About this webinar

Recorded On: Wednesday, March, 10, 2021

Presented By: Golden Helix Field Application Scientist: Darby Kammeraad

Over the years, VarSeq has evolved into a powerfully efficient next-gen sequencing variant analysis platform. Some of the recent advances Golden Helix has made to this software have been to implement the standard ACMG and AMP guidelines for variant classification and interpretation. The guidelines are composed of many criteria impacting any variant final classification. These criteria consider topics such as frequency of the variant among the population, functional predictions, hotspot pathogenic rich regions in the gene, as well as known clinical submissions from other labs. The reality with this guideline review is that variant evidence can changeover time. Among the long list of databases needed to automate this guideline process, many databases have massive updates or are frequently updated perhaps on a month-to-month basis. So, it follows that any classification can be altered once discoveries for these variants are made. A problem that arises is, how to manage changing classifications, retroactively review previous patient outcomes and updatevariant classifications accordingly. Fortunately, Golden Helix has solved this dilemma with the use of our VSWarehouse genomic repository.

In this webcast, we are going to explore the value and application of VSWarehouse. Our example variants will showcase a situation where variants of uncertain significance ultimately reach a pathogenic classification based on updates to ClinVar. This change will be presented not only in VarSeq with listings of previous samples but also shown directly from the VSWarehouse browser in a ClinVar classification tracker. We will also look at an alternative situation where the classification may change to benign for some previously reported variants which would require follow-up with the patient. The importance of a tool like the ClinVar tracker in VSWarehouse cannot be understated as it is a simple way to comprehensively review the backlog of changing variant classifications when users must update their locked down validated NGS pipeline. Please join us in the upcoming webcast to explore how these features in VarSeq and VSWarehouse work to allow users thorough accountability in updating historical patient results with new variant evidence.