Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, first place winner in this year’s Abstract Challenge, will present his work to the community via a live webcast on Wednesday, April 20th at noon EDT. Dr. Aminkeng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics (CMMT) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Aminkeng’s research focus is the pharmacogenomics of adverse… Read more »
Golden Helix Featured in 20 Most Promising Biotech Technology Solution Providers for 2016! This month, CIO Review released a Biotech Technology Special in which Golden Helix was named among the 20 most promising biotech technology solution providers for 2016. Read the interview with our CEO, Andreas Scherer here: Empowering Precision Medicine through Next-Gen Technology Our customers are monumental in this… Read more »
Wednesday, April 6th 12:00 pm EDT As the number of samples and associated data volume in a testing lab increases, it becomes imperative for labs to leverage state of the art warehousing technology that not only organizes data, but also aides and enables researchers and clinicians to perform further analysis, and ongoing research. Built on the algorithms and high-performance storage… Read more »
In 1914, the German cytologist Theodor Boveri coined the phrase “Cancer is a disease of the genome”. At this time, his ideas were as equally revolutionary as they were highly contested. Fast forward. More than a hundred years later, Next-Generation Sequencing effectively permits a highly sensitive analysis of cancer cells. It can help us to understand mutations associated with cancer… Read more »
Thank you to all who submitted an abstract in the 2016 Abstract Challenge, it was a great success! With more than 30 submissions and a wide variety of topics, selecting only 3 winners very difficult! With that being said, here are the top 3 winners for this year’s Abstract Challenge: Our 1st place winner is Dr. Folefac Aminkeng, Postdoctoral Fellow… Read more »
Wednesday, March 2nd 12:00 pm EST Clinical labs must have the ability to go from a collection of samples and associated variants to a professional report documenting a short list of clinically relevant variants. Cancer Gene Panels are a common clinical application for genetic tests. In this webcast we will show how VarSeq and VSReports can be used to go… Read more »
Yesterday, it was my pleasure to share in a live webcast our integrated solution for genetic data warehousing, VSWarehouse. Although we had a great set of questions at the end of our presentation, we didn’t have time to answer all of them, so here is a selection of the remaining representative questions and my answers. We can provide a hosted version… Read more »
The holiday season has come to a close and we are headed to sunny San Diego for PAG XXIV! This year, our President and CEO Andreas Scherer along with Greta Linse Peterson our Director of Services and Mary Makris our Operations and Marketing Manger, will be manning the Golden Helix booth, so stop by booth 129 to say “Hi!”. Since PAG XXIII,… Read more »
As VarSeq gains in popularity, we want to give Viewers and customers alike the opportunity to look at projects that are completed from start to finish. To this end, VarSeq (and VarSeq Viewer!) currently comes with two demonstration projects, Example TruSight Cardio Gene Panel and Example YRI Exome Trio Analysis. To access these projects from the VarSeq start page go to… Read more »
Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 Passed! We at Golden Helix, and I are certain that many in our community, are more than pleased to hear that President Obama has signed the “Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015“. Most importantly, the budget agreement raises discretionary spending by $80 billion in fiscal years 2016 and 2017 which should create room for increased spending… Read more »
After our announcement in August that we would be making GxE Regression available in SVS, we were pleased to receive feedback that this was exactly what our customers had been wanting. Being able to account for environmental effects or gene effects as interacting with the SNPs was essential to those researchers working with GWAS. Unfortunately, this did not help our customers who were… Read more »
Our final webcast presentation in the series of winners from our Annual Abstract Challenge is first place recipient Dr. Sergey Kornilov. A Postdoctoral Associate in the Child Study Center at Yale University’s School of Medicine, Dr. Kornilov’s submission focused on the genetic basis of developmental language disorders in a geographically isolated Russian-speaking population. Next week on October 14th, he will… Read more »
The Golden Helix® team is gearing up for ASHG 2015 in Baltimore as I would guess many of you are too. I for one am super excited since I grew up in the Baltimore area and have a fondness for Inner Harbor and crabs! This year, you will find Ashley Hintz (our Field Application Scientist) and myself just inside the… Read more »
With our latest release of VarSeq last Thursday, we are proud to offer the VarSeq ® Viewer to the community, for free! When you download VarSeq ® Viewer, you can explore pre-built projects to interact with the annotations and filters the project provides, visualize selected variants with pile-ups, and export data to widely used formats. To get you started, we have included… Read more »
A widely attended conference that is coming up on September 21-23 is the third international conference on Genomics 2015 in San Antonio, Texas. The theme of this year’s conference is “Implications and Impacts of Genomic Advances on Global Health“, which promises to provide some interesting presentations and discussions. Current issues in the field to be addressed include next-gen sequencing, clinical and… Read more »
The past few months our webcast has featured a winner from our Annual Abstract Challenge, and we are happy to have our second place winner, Hilal Al Shekaili, as our speaker for September. Hilal’s submission surrounded novel genetic variants in a consanguineous family with pyridoxine-dependent epilepsy, and he will speak on his studies next Wednesday, September 9th (register here). To… Read more »
When it comes to down to it, the genomic variants we collect in a research and clinical setting are impossible to interpret without that important link of how genes are related to phenotypes. Indisputably, the Johns Hopkins project to catalog all evidence related to inheritable Mendelian diseases is our best repository of this evidence. Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM)… Read more »
A prerequisite for clinical NGS interpretation is ensuring that the data being analyzed is of high enough quality to support the test results being returned to the physician. The keystone of this quality control process is coverage analysis. Coverage analysis has two distinct parts. Ensure that there is sufficient coverage to be confident in called variants Make certain that no… Read more »
Today, we are proud to announce our collaboration with Fulgent Genetics, a CLIA certified molecular diagnostics lab. Fulgent offers more than 4,000 single gene tests among others and will implement VSPipeline to help speed up their analysis and interpretation process. On our quest to enable precision medicine, we look forward to working with Fulgent and other diagnostics labs in the… Read more »
Earlier this spring we announced that Meta-Analysis was coming to SVS very soon. Now, I am pleased to announce that it is available in the latest release of SVS (version 8.4.0). Meta-Analysis takes the results of two or more GWAS studies for multiple SNPs or markers, and standard meta-analysis statistics are then performed on each SNP and the results compiled into… Read more »
