Traditionally genetic tests in cancer have focused on small gene panels that restrict their analysis to a small number of well-studied cancer genes. However, as sequencing costs have decreased, many clinical laboratories have embraced comprehensive genomic profiling tests that rely on whole exome and whole genome next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows, which can detect millions of high-quality variants for a single… Read more »
When doing clinical variant analysis, it is often essential to keep track of the variants that are encountered in each sample, their pathogenic or oncogenic classifications, which individual created or saved an interpretation, and when. For this purpose, VarSeq prompts VSClinical users to create default assessment catalogs in which to store variants and other events. However, we are aware that… Read more »
The AMP guidelines workflow in VSClinical provides a user-friendly tool for the interpretation of somatic biomarkers across the entire spectrum of genomic variation. One of the most useful features of this workflow is its ability to streamline the evaluation of clinical evidence for a somatic biomarker using the AMP Tier evidence levels. The AMP Guidelines classify a biomarker into one… Read more »
Discover the Latest Developments in Variant Classification and Interpretation Tools at Golden Helix’s Booth at AMP Europe 2023 in Milan, Italy We are thrilled to announce that Golden Helix will be participating in the AMP Europe 2023 conference in Milan! We are eagerly looking forward to connecting with leading healthcare professionals and researchers in the field of genetics at this… Read more »
Explore the importance of negative findings in genomic medicine through the lens of VarSeq’s VSClinical AMP. When analyzing a somatic sample in VarSeq, users have the option to report on several types of biomarkers with VSClinical AMP. In addition to your usual mutational biomarkers such as small variants, your copy number variants, and structural variants, we support the analysis of… Read more »
Discover the Thrilling Automation Capabilities of VarSeq Suite for NGS Testing and Learn How We’re Tackling Contemporary Lab Challenges First off, I’d like to thank everyone who joined us for our February webcast on the automation capabilities of the VarSeq software suite through VSPipeline. For those of you who joined us, I’m sure it’s obvious that automation is a topic… Read more »
Discover the innovative clinical evidence search of the VSClinical AMP workflow, where patient biomarkers and tumor types are matched to the most relevant data from top sources like CIViC, DrugBank, and Clinical Trials. One of the core features of the VSClinical AMP interpretation workflow is the ability to search third-party data sources to find clinical evidence that matches the patient’s… Read more »
Revolutionize Your Somatic Variant Analysis with Our Cutting-Edge Template for Annotation and Filtering in VarSeq Golden Helix is excited to share our new Comprehensive Cancer Template for somatic variant annotation and filtering, along with the latest version of our software VarSeq 2.3.0! Our latest VarSeq update was specifically focused on getting up to speed with multiple aspects of somatic variant… Read more »
Our recent webcast, Maximizing the Benefits of Comprehensive Genomic Testing in Cancer Care with Golden Helix CancerKB 2.0, was an opportunity to unveil Golden Helix CancerKB v2.0. Our latest VarSeq release was designed to address the changing landscape of cancer genomics, and in this webcast, we discussed the application of our very own Golden Helix CancerKB in the context of… Read more »
VSClinical AMP Matching of Interpretations In this blog post, we will delve into the intricacies of the VSClinical AMP interpretation workflow. At the heart of this process lies the task of annotating cancer biomarkers with the correct interpretations based on the classification of the tumor and the type and scope of the biomarker. This is a crucial step in understanding… Read more »
Discover the latest advancements in cancer genomic profiling with the release of VarSeq 2.3.0 We are very excited to announce the release of VarSeq 2.3.0! This release was one of the largest VarSeq releases yet, as it includes a large refactor to the VSClinical AMP cancer module. A primary motivation for the release was focused on the availability and increased… Read more »
Learn about the latest cancer ontology software updates and how they can enhance your research and work. Cancer Ontology An important feature of the VSClinical AMP workflow is the ability to select the correct tumor type for a given evaluation. The selected tumor type is used to identify relevant clinical evidence, including drug sensitivities, resistances, and previous biomarker interpretations. This… Read more »
Our FAS team would like to thank everyone who attended our December 2022 webcast, A User’s Perspective: Somatic Variant Analysis in VarSeq 2.3.0. This webcast allowed three members of our FAS team to give their unique insights concerning the improvements to our new VarSeq 2.3.0 release, which will be recapped here. Starting with template creation, our Technical Field Application Scientist,… Read more »
The Golden Helix team is headed off to Phoenix, AZ for the Association for Molecular Pathology Annual Meeting & Expo (AMP) 2022. We are enthusiastically awaiting a week of genetics discussions with new and familiar faces. If you are attending, please stop by our booth and say hello! We will be exhibiting at booth 1432. Golden Helix President & CEO,… Read more »
There are a number of conferences coming up on our schedule in the next few weeks. It’s a great opportunity check out the latest developments at Golden Helix and see exciting technologies in action. These conferences are a wonderful opportunity to discuss new discoveries in genomics. We will be there with our clinical NGS analysis software, the VarSeq suite, to… Read more »
Thank you to those who attended our webcast on the user perspective of our automated AMP guidelines! Furthermore, let me express our appreciation for those particularly engaged users who posed some very thoughtful questions. While we weren’t able to answer all of them live, I hope to shed some light on some pertinent details of somatic analysis here. Let’s start… Read more »
We are very excited to announce that just last week, we released VarSeq 2.2.4! In the past few months, we have been building the excitement for the 2.2.4 version of VarSeq with several webcasts in which we describe some of the headlining features in detail such as the new support for Gene Panels and Gene Lists, PhoRank Clinical, and Customized… Read more »
Recently we have released blog posts discussing updates to annotations in VarSeq such as ClinVar and COSMIC. Keeping with that trend, in this blog post, I will discuss the most recent updates to the Golden Helix CancerKB database. For those how may be unfamiliar with the Golden Helix CancerKB source, it is a professional curated set of interpretations for the… Read more »
Did you know you can control your preferred transcript settings for clinical interpretation in VSClinical? Your lab is analyzing the DNA of a tissue sample from a patient with small cell lung cancer. The lab technician has imported the patient data into VSClinical to detect clinically relevant variants and evaluate and score these according to the AMP Guidelines, as well… Read more »
Golden Helix software provides huge analytic gain in handling large-scale genomic data. For example, a number of VarSeq users run cohort projects of whole genome level data processing hundreds of millions of variants at a time. However, many of our users are running gene panel level data for custom panels related to cancer (both hereditary and somatic), autism, cardiac, and… Read more »