Abstract
Caring for patients is now 99% information and 1% intervention. With the exponential growth of literature, continual changes in clinical trial availability, and frequent updates in drug indications, keeping pace with rapid developments is critical to delivering accurate patient reports with pathogenicity and actionability insights. QIAGEN is committed to bridging this gap, enabling physicians to provide better care with better knowledge, resulting in better overall outcomes for the patient.
Exactly five years ago, QIAGEN established a bioinformatics business area to address the rapidly growing needs of our customers to transform biological samples into valuable molecular insights. Since then, we have grown to become the leading provider of commercial bioinformatics software and data solutions, and more recently, we entered the clinical space, providing solutions and services to support precision medicine.
QIAGEN Clinical Insight (QCI®) is our precision medicine platform that reproducibly transforms raw sequencing data into clinician-ready reports with actionable insights for any indication—germline or somatic. Built upon QIAGEN’s Ingenuity Knowledge Base, the industry’s largest and most up-to-date repository of expertly curated information, QCI enables clinical labs and healthcare organizations of all sizes to deploy precision medicine capabilities quickly and confidently, regardless of NGS testing focus or experience. QCI standardizes the analysis, interpretation, and reporting of clinical NGS data by automating AMP/ASCO/CAP and ACMG/AMP guidelines. Unlike many competitors using machine learning techniques, QCI’s set of AI-based technologies provides complete transparency to the underlying clinical evidence used to derive each automated variant classification. This unique feature gives lab directors complete control over their reporting and peace-of-mind that their reports are delivered consistently and accurately, avoiding the “black box” in the interpretative process that is typical in many machine learning (ML)-based approaches. QCI instead blends the ease and efficiency of automation and ML-based approaches without losing the trust of manual curation searches.
Over 20 years, we have made tremendous investments to develop and maintain QIAGEN’s Ingenuity Knowledge Base. Over 200 M.D. and Ph.D. certified expert curators manually extract insights from more than 4,000 scientific journals, increasing the depth and breadth of the repository on a daily basis. In addition to this significant curation effort, QCI integrates HGMD®, the Human Gene Mutation Database, the gold standard resource for comprehensive coverage of published germline human inherited disease mutations, exclusively licensed through QIAGEN. By providing clarity in reporting, we in turn are improving healthcare decision making and, ultimately, patient outcomes.
We believe genomics-guided precision medicine will transform healthcare in fundamental ways through integration of data from multiple testing platforms, including the growing body of patient clinical data, to provide comprehensive profiles that can inform care plans. Today, we are witnessing a shift beyond DNA-based diagnostic testing toward theranostics and prognostic applications. Our core competency resides in being able to provide customers with unique, high-quality, proprietary knowledge bases, curated experimental data repositories, and real-world patient data that serve as the foundation for our entire bioinformatics portfolio. With this, we will be helping unlock untapped opportunities to better help our customers solve some of the hardest scientific and clinical problems.
At the beginning of 2019, QIAGEN announced the acquisition of N-of-One, a molecular oncology decision support company that provides case-specific, expert-powered clinical NGS interpretation services and solutions. N-of-One’s technology-enabled, yet human-driven, services and the proprietary MarkerMine™ database are planned to be integrated into QIAGEN Clinical Insight (QCI), opening the door to new opportunities for supporting healthcare providers and payers with access to real-world evidence insights. This acquisition represents a unique opportunity for QIAGEN and N-of-One to combine respective strengths and deliver the industry’s most robust portfolio of clinical decision support solutions from one provider.
