As many of our users know, VarSeq comes shipped with various project templates that are designed to give users a baseline workflow to get started with their projects. These templates are tailored for various applications including tumor-normal, trios, cancer and hereditary gene panels, and ACMG Guidelines workflows. The templates contain application-specific annotation sources and algorithms that will automatically load into… Read more »
Data and security breaches are a fact of life. Organizations are aware of the threats and putting their best efforts up to prevent them as much as possible. Industries across the entire spectrum have been exposed in recent years. I will go through a few examples to show how pervasive this issue has become. Target One prominent data breach occurred in… Read more »
Customizing VSClinical ACMG Guidelines Workflow Part 2 In the first part of this series, we covered how VarSeq provides customization of the clinical analysis workflow process. VSClinical’s various customization parameters within the ACMG Guidelines workflow includes the choice of how the internal knowledge base of previous variant interpretations are stored and what considerations go into this choice. In this blog, we… Read more »
Hospitals and testing labs are undergoing a digital transformation like any other business in our time. They deal with personal data in categories with the highest level of security requirements: personal identity and medical records. The architecture chosen to store and analyze this data is critical to provide the best protection against a data breach incident. The liability and institutional… Read more »
When interpreting a variant using the AMP/ASCO guidelines for somatic variant interpretation, clinicians must determine whether the variant can be considered a biomarker that affects clinical care by predicting sensitivity, resistance, or toxicity to a specific therapy. Such a determination requires the investigation of multiple evidence sources, including clinical trials, FDA approved therapies and peer-reviewed studies. Unfortunately, strong evidence linking… Read more »
Clinical labs offer a unique and sophisticated product that is performed repeatedly with high standards of quality. VarSeq was developed to provide labs with the customization required for clinical genetic tests in a repeatable workflow. On top of this, VSClinical offers additional parameters and choices that can be made when designing the test workflow. In this blog series, we will… Read more »
Happy New Year! Certainly, I hope you had a relaxing time over the holidays with family and friends as well as a great start into the new year. 2019 was a real landmark year for Golden Helix. Please let me mention a few highlights: We launched VSClinical AMP in June 2019: This product is supporting the clinical variant interpretation based… Read more »
Genetic testing labs deal with personal data in categories with the highest level of security requirements: personal identity and medical records. Given the liability and risk associated with a breach of this secure information, it is not surprising that many labs and institutes that aggregate genomic data prefer, if not require, on-premise analysis and storage solutions. Golden Helix is in… Read more »
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 »
Copy Number Variation (CNV) is a type of structural variation in which sections of the genome are duplicated or deleted. Although CNV events are rare in the human population, constituting approximately 10% of the human genome, they are also associated with being causal mutations for disease phenotypes. Because of this, it is important for clinical and research settings to identify… Read more »
Thank you all for tuning in to yesterday’s webcast, “Simplify Your GWAS & Genomic Prediction with SVS”. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did! If you didn’t get a chance to join us for this live webcast, you can watch the recording below. We covered a lot of topics in so little time, but you all… Read more »
If you have watched this blog over time, it would be no surprise that Golden Helix invests a lot in curating genomic annotations for use with our clinical and research analysis products. Often, we spend considerable time on the attention to detail necessary to ensure the best experience for any data source by cleaning, normalizing, documenting and then distributing it through our data annotation server. Many annotations… Read more »
We look forward to hearing how you are using Golden Helix software in your clinical or research work! Golden Helix strives to enable precision medicine by developing powerful software to support researchers and clinicians with complex analysis. One of my favorite events of the year is our abstract competition. This competition allows us to help our community by recognizing innovative… Read more »
SVS is a project-oriented program that manages and analyzes genomic datasets. This webcast statistically and visually explores the relationships among genetic variants within a cattle dataset. Even further, this webcast evaluates genotypes with corresponding phenotypes to assess how well a model can predict a phenotype of interest. Starting with genotypic data from the microarray and the recorded phenotypic data for… Read more »
Our team has returned from the annual meeting of the Association of Molecular Pathology (AMP 2019), and, as always, I am grateful for all the wonderful experiences we are bringing back with us. The plenary sessions and talks were bountiful, and we were very impressed with the well-organized exhibition. Hats off to everyone involved in planning this great event! Innovation… Read more »
It’s the most wonderful time of the year; our software specials are here! Now is the time to implement a Golden Helix solution to automate your workflows and analyze variants quick, easy, and affordably with our Year-End Bundles. Select packages which come once a year… these deals have been designed to fit your lab’s needs – and budget. Please note… Read more »
The Golden Helix team is excited to be headed to Baltimore for the AMP 2019 Meeting, and we hope to see you there! You will find our team at booth #2856. Swing by or schedule a time to talk with us one on one about how Golden Helix’s platform is redefining next-gen sequencing analysis. Our team would love to hear… Read more »
As our team returns from another successful ASHG conference, I would like to reflect on the great memories, connections, and future plans that were made at this meeting. First, I will start by thanking everyone involved with the superb planning and execution of the conference. We are thankful to have this opportunity to connect with our customers, partners, and friends… Read more »
The common approaches to detecting copy number variants (CNVs) are chromosomal microarray and MLPA. However, both options increase analysis time, per sample costs, and are limited to the size of CNV events that can be detected. VarSeq’s CNV caller, on the other hand, allows users to detect CNVs from the coverage profile stored in the BAM file, which allows you… Read more »
Before examining the clinical evidence associated with a specific mutation, a clinician must establish that the variant is likely to be a driver mutation which generates functional changes that enhance tumor cell proliferation. Our recent blog series “Following the AMP Guidelines with VSClinical” briefly mentioned how the oncogenicity scoring system in VSClinical could be used to automate and assist the… Read more »
