We are ending the first half of the year with a webcast featuring our entire clinical software stack: Golden Helix’s End-to-End Solution for Clinical Labs. This webcast is scheduled for Wednesday, June 7th at noon EST, and it’s not one you’ll want to miss! Here are the full details: Wednesday, June 7th 12:00 pm EST In this webcast we will provide an… Read more »
In just a few days, Golden Helix will arrive in Copenhagen, Denmark to attend the 2017 European Society of Human Genetics Conference (ESHG). We are excited to be returning to ESHG for the second year in a row! It’s always a pleasure to see our European customers and meet some new faces in the community. This year the Golden Helix team will be… Read more »
Yesterday we had an excellent webcast presentation featuring Sentieon’s Dr. Donald Freed. Golden Helix recently partnered with Sentieon to integrate their secondary analysis tools into our software stack, and this presentation is an introduction to their genomic tools. Please check the webcast out here if you missed it! There were a number of questions asked in the live event, so in… Read more »
Today, we are happy to announce a multi-year partnership with Sentieon, a company that develops bioinformatics secondary analysis tools to process genomic data. This partnership will integrate Sentieon’s secondary analysis tools with Golden Helix software to provide users with a comprehensive solution for genomic data analysis. Sentieon’s suite of secondary analysis tools made the significant improvement in runtime over BWA-MEM, GATK,… Read more »
We had lots of customers publish their work using our SVS software, and I wanted to share their work with you. Congrats to all! Here are some of the highlights: Francesca Fernandez of the University of Wollongong along with colleagues published Effects of common GRM5 genetic variants on cognition, hippocampal volume and mGluR5 protein levels in schizophrenia in Brain Imaging and… Read more »
Nathan Fortier’s webcast yesterday, CNV Analysis in VarSeq – A User’s Perspective, was an excellent demonstration of our CNV capabilites, so check it out here if you missed it. There were a number of questions asked in the live event, so in today’s blog post I wanted to recap the Q&A session. Question: Do the reference samples have to be from the… Read more »
Recently, we added a natively supported Genotype Phasing and Imputation capability in SNP & Variation Suite 8.7.0. Since then we have had fantastic feedback and adoption as folks take advantage of the BEAGLE 4.0 and 4.1 algorithms from within their existing SNP GWAS and agrigenomic workflows. One piece of feedback we heard from our time at PAG, ACMG and our… Read more »
This year’s annual Abstract Challenge was once again a successful event. We want to thank all that participated. This year we had nearly 50 submissions and our decision was a difficult one. Here are the selected winners. This year, we had dual first place winners; Reza Sailani and Jingga Inlora of the Michael Snyder lab in the Department of Genetics at… Read more »
This generation of scientists, clinicians and bioinformaticians have already elevated the standards for diagnosis, prediction and care, ultimately improving patient outcome for millions of people by leveraging genomic information. This trend is only going to continue. Next-gen sequencing has made its way into the clinic. Golden Helix supports the adoption of Precision Medicine by building products, such as our VarSeq… Read more »
Genome-wide association study (GWAS) technology has been a primary method for identifying the genes responsible for diseases and other traits for the past ten years. GWAS continues to be highly relevant as a scientific method. Over 2000 human GWAS reports now appear in scientific journals. In fact, we see its adoption increasing beyond the human-centric research into the world of… Read more »
Just as we expected, 2017 has kicked off with a flurry of new publications by our customers. We even had a publication from a client using our VarSeq software! Congratulations to all, please take a look at some of the articles we have highlighted below: Reza Sailani of Stanford University and colleagues published Association of AHSG with alopecia and mental retardation… Read more »
With a properly defined wet-lab and bioinformatics process, we are able to zero in on clinically relevant variants. How does a lab report on the outcome of their analysis? We find that most laboratories conduct their variant classification based on the guidelines formulated by the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) for inherited diseases. The ACMG guidelines for variant classification… Read more »
Golden Helix closed out 2016 with a great honor; in December, The Silicon Review Magazine released a special edition naming Golden Helix as one of the fastest-growing technology companies for 2016. You can read the interview with our CEO, Andreas Scherer, Ph.D, here: Delivering industry-leading analytic software and services. We continue to believe that our customers are paramount in this honor, as… Read more »
ASHG 2016 is in our rear mirror. Again, it was bigger and better than the previous year. The conference hosted over 9,000 visitors from 66 countries. This gave the event a level of vibrancy that was evenly matched by the wonderful ambiance of the city of Vancouver. Nestled in between the two conference centers was a little pier offering spectacular… Read more »
Today we reached an important milestone. We have registered over 10,000 confirmed eBook downloads. Of course we are thrilled! Over the years, we aimed to contribute relevant content to the community. For some time, we have blogged and conducted webinars on the latest technology, methods and best practices. Our eBooks were the latest addition to this mix. We received a… Read more »
Any validated bioinformatics pipeline must be continuously monitored. Quality management in clinical testing labs ensures that any divergence from predefined quality metrics during the analysis of clinical samples is investigated. For example: There is an insufficient number of sequence reads that passed the predefined base quality score threshold The number of variants identified in a data set may deviate substantially… Read more »
After the Wet Lab process has been completed, the bioinformatics analysis of the sequencing data work begins. The next three blogs will focus on three aspects of this process. The building blocks of a bioinformatics pipeline, documentation and validation (today’s topic) Quality Management Clinical Reporting The Building Blocks of an NGS PipelineThe bioinformatics process to analyze NGS data occurs in three… Read more »
Getting the NGS wet bench process right is not a small undertaking. Targeted NGS assays such as multigene panels or exome sequencing allow for the targeted analysis of genomic regions that are of particular interest. For every sample type, e.g. blood, formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded specimens, saliva etc, there must be a detailed protocol in place outlining how each sample type is going… Read more »
We have come a long way since Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) evolved as a set of technologies in the 1970s. The higher throughput and rapid reduction of costs associated with NGS have lead to the accelerated adoption of clinical testing that we are experiencing today. Currently, it is applied to analyze inherited diseases, tumors, hematologic malignancies and infectious diseases. It is… Read more »
The adoption of genetic services is key to our ability to provide personalized medicine in the future. The goal is to better diagnose diseases, predict their outcome, and choose the best possible care option for a patient. We still have a long way to go to achieve this goal. While there is agreement about the ultimate goal, there is still… Read more »
