Category Archives: About Golden Helix

Powerful Cohort Analysis with VarSeq’s Count Alleles Algorithm

         February 25, 2020

Although VarSeq is intentionally designed to be a clinical NGS pipeline tool able to run a handful or even single samples through, we have many users who run large cohort style studies with the tool as well. One common use is to compare case/control data to isolate variants shared among affected individuals and exclude those in unaffected. One incredibly powerful… Read more »

Golden Helix’s End-to-End Architecture for Clinical Testing Labs

         December 19, 2019
Golden Helix's End-to-End Architecture

As clinical genetic tests have been adopted as a critical enabler of precision medicine, the number of tests offered by clinical labs and the volume of tested patients has grown by orders of magnitude in the past five years. The Gene Testing Registry, managed by the NIH, documented a rise from 13,000 to 60,000 tests offered in the US market… Read more »

Somatic Variant Calling with Sentieon: Customizations

         December 10, 2019
Sentieon

The first two blogs in this series covered Sentieon’s somatic variant calling from Tumor with Normal (Part I) and Tumor without Normal (Part II). In addition to providing multiple somatic variant calling processes, users also have access to high-sensitivity scripts and full support for the GRCh38 reference assembly. Without going into excessive detail, this final blog of the series will… Read more »

Somatic Variant Calling with Sentieon: Tumor-Only Workflow

         November 19, 2019
Sentieon

To recap what we have covered in this blog series thus far, Sentieon allows users to call somatic variants against a matched normal sample and a tumor-only analysis. Part I of this series covered the variant calling workflow for tumors with matching normal samples. However, a common situation would be to call variants for a tumor sample without the normal…. Read more »

Somatic Variant Calling with Sentieon: Tumor-Normal Workflow

         October 31, 2019
Sentieon

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, Sentieon allows users to call somatic variants against a matched normal sample and a tumor-only analysis. Utilization of a Tumor-Normal Workflow In addition to the fundamental process of alignment and variant calling, there are a few more steps that will improve the quality of your secondary analysis. Figure 1 (below)… Read more »

Our Philosophy on Quality in Product Testing and Development

         December 6, 2018

High product quality is a foundational characteristic of a useful and successful product. Quality testing, therefore, is a necessary, albeit an open-ended task. It can at times seem a limitless undertaking in the present using experience from the past to improve the future. Nonetheless, it is approached as a development stage at Golden Helix that is just as essential as… Read more »

Golden Helix Receives NIH-SBIR Phase 2 Grant 2R44 GM125432-02

         September 24, 2018

It is our distinct pleasure to inform the GHI community that we have been awarded a Phase II SBIR Grant from the National Institutes of Health. As we are also preparing to celebrate our 20th Anniversary, these two events invoke a lot of excitement within our company and what lies ahead, for not GHI only, but the genetics field entirely…. Read more »

Future Direction of Golden Helix

         September 19, 2018

Celebrating our 20th Anniversary on September 15th, we took some time to reflect on the last two decades in this industry. Two decades of learning, adaption, and growth on the business side as well as the personal side. Employees began their careers with us, made new friends and started their own families. These past 20 years are full of stories… Read more »

Clinical Variant Interpretation: Part IV

         April 24, 2018
VSClinical algorithm

In the last installment of this series, I covered the basics of variant interpretation and how it fits into the genomic testing process. Now we can cover in more detail how VSClinical works, what algorithms and annotation sources power the recommendations and how the ACMG criteria are organized into useful categories. VSClinical is built to make the process of evaluating… Read more »

Clinical Variant Interpretation: Part III

         April 19, 2018
VCF file format

Yesterday we launched VSClincial with our first webcast in what will be a series about this powerful new way to perform variant interpretation following the ACMG guidelines. In this post, I wanted to cover the motivation for VSClinical and how we curated and presented the 33 criteria from the ACMG Guidelines into an intuitive workflow with various bioinformatic evidence and… Read more »

Using NGS to detect CNVs in familial hypercholesterolemia Q&A

         February 19, 2018

First-place Abstract Competition Winner, Michael Iacocca, shared his research with the Golden Helix Community during our February webcast ‘Using NGS to detect CNVs in familial hypercholesterolemia‘. In this webcast, he gave a great explanation on how our CNV caller aided his team in their research. If you were unable to join us for the event, you can find a recording… Read more »

10 Most Innovative Pharma and Life Sciences Solutions Providers 2018

         January 29, 2018
innovative

Awarded one of the top biotech companies Insight Success recently published its annual Pharma and Life Special Edition announcing the 10 most innovative solution providers of 2018. We are incredibly honored to have received this award and being recognized amongst the top biotech companies! You can access the publication featuring my interview with the editor here: http://www.insightssuccess.com/golden-helix-helping-researchers-clinicians-understand-role-cnvs-human-health-disease/. I have outlined some… Read more »

Top Webcasts of 2017

         January 9, 2018

2017 was an incredibly prosperous year for Golden Helix; we released a handful of new features, announced new partnerships and completed our end-to-end architecture for clinical testing labs. Our webcast series has become a very popular way for our community to stay up-to-date with our new capabilities and best practices in genetic analysis using our software. We had three webcast… Read more »

Bring the Value of VS-CNV to Genomic Research in SVS

         January 4, 2018
Eigenvalue Decomposition

The Golden Helix SNP & Variation Suite (SVS) platform is a powerful and versatile set of tools and algorithms for performing genomic research. That research spans from data originating on genotype micro-arrays to next-generation sequencing. While the majority of SVS users start with genotype data on their samples, any genomic information across a cohort can be used in our various… Read more »

What to expect from Golden Helix in 2018

         January 2, 2018

First of all, I wish you a prosperous 2018 along with happiness and health for you and your loved ones. This next year comes with lots of anticipation. We at Golden Helix are looking forward to another year of growth and innovation. Over the last few years, we were able to build a large following of clients in the clinical space…. Read more »

New VarSeq Single Exome Demo Project

         September 26, 2017
single exome

As VarSeq is quickly becoming the go-to variant analysis software for tertiary analysis, we want to give our readers the opportunity to examine completed projects from start to finish. As an addition to the currently available demonstration projects, we are pleased to provide users with a Single Exome Analysis example project. To access this project simply click here to download… Read more »

Annotation Education Series: Clinical Assessment Tracks

         September 21, 2017

Clinical Assessment Tracks Golden Helix provides a large catalog of annotation sources for our research and clinical clientele. Making these public data repositories available to all our users is no easy task. As Cody Sarrazin mentioned in his blog post, annotation curation is a complex data science pipeline. This process aggregates data from many disparate sources and normalizes it into… Read more »