Search results for “annotation”

Customizing Your VSClinical Workflow: Part II

Jan 27, 2020

In the first part of this series, we covered how VarSeq supports customizing ACMG guidelines in VSClinical to streamline the clinical analysis workflow. 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…

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Cyber Security Strategies for NGS Testing Labs: Part I

Jan 23, 2020

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…

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Introducing Drugs and Trials for Cancer Diagnostics

Jan 23, 2020

When interpreting a variant using the AMP 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,…

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Customizing Your VSClinical Workflow: Part I

Jan 14, 2020

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…

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Securing Your Genomic Testing with Golden Helix

Dec 19, 2019

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…

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

Dec 19, 2019

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…

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Somatic Variant Calling with Sentieon: Customizations

Dec 10, 2019

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…

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Reflecting on AMP 2019

Nov 14, 2019

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…

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All New VSClinical AMP Workflow Tutorial

Nov 5, 2019

We have recently added a tutorial to help introduce customers to the ease and utility of the AMP Guidelines incorporated in VarSeq’s VSClinical package. The AMP Guidelines allow users to sort through available clinical evidence in a streamlined fashion to arrive at final classification and interpretation and then transfer that…

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Somatic Variant Calling with Sentieon: Tumor-Normal Workflow

Oct 31, 2019

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…

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VarSeq 2.2.0 Release Notes

Oct 23, 2019

VarSeq 2.2.0 was released today and this a stable release full of upgrades and polishes. Some of the newer features include the ability to store and include AMP Cancer assessment catalogs on VSWarehouse, quicker accessibility to common annotations plotted in GenomeBrowse, and the addition of all of our standard templates…

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Reflecting on ASHG 2019

Oct 22, 2019

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…

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Copy Number Variants Using AMP Guidelines

Oct 10, 2019

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…

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Variant Interpretation with VSClinical: RET-KIF5b Gene Fusion

Sep 24, 2019

Gene Fusion Background Gene fusions are hybrid genes that result from translocations, interstitial deletions, or chromosomal inversions that can lead to constitutive gene activation and result in increased or abnormal protein production. Increased or abnormal protein production subsequently can play an important role in tumorigenesis and thus identifying and evaluating…

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Automating & Standardizing Your NGS Workflow: Part IV

Sep 10, 2019

We have covered a lot of ground in this Automating & Standardizing Your Workflows blog series. First, we saw how to perform secondary analysis with Sentieon to generate the necessary VCF and BAM files for tertiary analysis in Part I. The implementation of VSPipeline allowed for rapid import and project…

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Following the AMP Guidelines with VSClinical: Part II

Sep 5, 2019

VSClinical  users can interpret and report genomic mutations in cancer following the AMP guidelines which we’re demonstrating in this “Following the AMP Guidelines with VSClinical” blog series. Part I introduced the hands-on analysis steps involved in creating a high-quality clinical report for targeted Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) assays. We reviewed sample and variant quality, including the depth of coverage over the target…

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Automating & Standardizing Your NGS Workflow: Part II

Aug 29, 2019

VSPipeline: Automating your Tertiary Workflows The first part of this “Automating & Standardizing your NGS Workflow” blog series covered the secondary analysis steps of read alignment and variant calling with Sentieon. The next step is to transition into the tertiary analysis via utilization of our workflow automation tool, VSPipeline. VSPipeline…

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Following the AMP Guidelines with VSClinical: Part I

Aug 23, 2019

In the world of genomics shaping precision medicine in oncology, the limiting factor is the time-to-sign-out of a fully interpreted molecular profile report. There are many components of the entire testing process that add to the turn-around time of each test. Many of these steps, such as sample prep, sequencing, and automated secondary analysis,…

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Variant Interpretation with VSClinical: Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Aug 20, 2019

With the increasing knowledge of mutations involved in cancer, it is imperative to have a tertiary analysis pipeline that provides users with the most up to date information on somatic mutations. VSClinical’s Cancer Add-On does just that and more; with this feature, users can investigate and report on SNVs, indels,…

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Variant Interpretation with VSClinical: Huntington’s Disease (HD)

Aug 12, 2019

Huntington’s Disease (HD) Background Huntington’s Disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease that is caused by a mutation in the huntingtin (HTT) gene resulting in 36 or more CAG trinucleotide repeats in exon 1. Individuals affected by HD experience motor disorders including involuntary movements and poor coordination, cognitive impairments…

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