As I write this article, Golden Helix has hundreds of clients in top research institutions world-wide. The adoption of our product at these institutions ranges from a few individual users to site licenses used by entire organizations. Because of the quality of SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) and GenomeBrowse, our competence in the field is recognized, and increasingly our clients reach out to us to help them with their general bioinformatics needs. For example:

1. Clients – primarily pharma and biotech firms – outsource the bioinformatics portion of a study to our expert analysts.
2. Many users of SVS or GenomeBrowse want to create a repeatable process, and we are asked to develop a custom implementation. This can be automated workflows or customized scripts to make the overall solution more tailored, seamless and efficient.
3. Our users would like to receive custom training programs for their team or lab.

We recognize the need for a well-structured service offering that helps our clients make their day-to-day life easier and get even more value out of their investment in Golden Helix. For these reasons, we recently revamped and improved our services portfolio to better meet the needs of our clients. We offer the following services:

1. Genomic Analytics
We provide professional and unbiased analysis adhering to the highest statistical standards. With a staff of computer scientists, statistical geneticists, and bioinformaticians, Golden Helix acts as your extended workbench. Our diverse skillsets enable us to approach analytic challenges creatively and from several directions, with the result being novel, statistically significant, and most importantly, reproducible findings.

Our services range from initial study design, data preparation, and quality assurance to analysis and reporting. We provide the documentation so that this work can be included seamlessly in your research.

Outsourcing your genomic analytics immediately increases your in-house analytic capacity without going through a long, arduous hiring process and/or retraining existing employees. We are a very efficient and cost-effective solution if your organization experiences bioinformatics as a bottleneck.

2. Workflow Automation
We built the SVS user interface to allow nearly unlimited flexibility for researchers to explore data and pursue diverse workflows. However, if an SVS user has a standard set of procedures that are followed repetitively with many datasets, it is valuable to automate the process to reduce human error and inefficiencies. We see this kind of user profile increasingly in translational applications, where some of the workflows created by researchers are being used to analyze similar data sets in the clinic.

We provide customization and workflow automation services that are specific to your needs. We apply the same design and development standards to custom builds that we adhere to in building our commercial products. Key benefits for our clients are:

• Institute repeatable, consistent processes driven by compliance with established protocols.
• Improve quality of work and reduction of liability in clinical environments.
• Dramatically accelerate the training of new and existing SVS users.

3. Certification and Training
The proliferation of genomic data has exposed a new class of researchers, clinicians, and other front-line healthcare workers to the complexities of genomic data, increasing the demand for analytic expertise throughout an organization.

It is not scalable to hire out of this dilemma. Existing staff need to be empowered to competently perform analyses themselves. And easy-to-use platforms such as SVS are just the beginning.

The SVS Certification Program delivers a highly-focused and scalable “on the job” training regimen that can strategically and cost-effectively build an organization’s genomic analytic capacity. Main benefits to our clients are:

• Dramatically accelerate the training of new and existing SVS users.
• Institute repeatable, consistent processes driven by compliance with established protocols.
• Improve quality of work and reduction of liability in clinical environments.
• Increase in-house analytic capacity, reducing hiring burdens and reliance on 3rd parties.
• Produce more efficient work and faster project completion times.

Please reach out to us if you have a project that we can help with. We’d love to chat a little bit about your needs and how Golden Helix can provide additional value to your organization.