Qiagen N.V., a leading global provider of Sample to Insight solutions to transform biological materials into valuable molecular insights, announced a commercial agreement with GATC Biotech to provide GATC clients full access to Qiagen’s Ingenuity Variant Analysis solution for analysis and interpretation of genetic data.

GATC is one of Europe’s leading providers of DNA and RNA sequencing services to customers worldwide. The access will take the form of interpretation services and direct access to Ingenuity Variant Analysis as a feature of the GATC Biotech’s services.

Ingenuity Variant Analysis is a powerful bioinformatics platform enabling laboratories to efficiently evaluate data generated by high-throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. The Qiagen software quickly filters genetic variants in a secure, private cloud-based environment to identify variants most likely to cause disease, drawing upon the industry-leading Ingenuity Knowledge Base.

Dr Marcus Benz, chief operating officer of GATC Biotech, commented: “This new commercial agreement with Qiagen provides our customers with full access to the Ingenuity software enabling rapid analysis and interpretation of next-generation sequencing data in terms of relevant genetic variations. We are offering our clients a unique, fully integrated one-stop solution. GATC Biotech selected the Ingenuity Variant Analysis solution as a perfect match. Integrating this software tool with our InView Human Exome product enables us to provide world-class data analysis for end-users of NGS, including clinical and laboratory geneticists and other professionals investigating diseases.”

“We are very pleased to partner with GATC Biotech, a respected provider serving more than 10,000 customers in academia and industry. Offering Ingenuity Variant Analysis to GATC Biotech clients, integrated with their own InView Human Exome NGS solution, further expands the growing global presence of our solution for analysis and interpretation of NGS data,” said Dr. Laura Furmanski, senior vice president of Qiagen and head of the Bioinformatics Business Area. “As next-generation sequencing spreads and its focus moves from data generation to interpretation, Qiagen’s leadership in bioinformatics solutions enables laboratories and clinicians to move rapidly from raw data to valuable insights.”

Qiagen offers industry-leading applications for the analysis, interpretation, and reporting of biological data through a diverse portfolio of solutions that include the Ingenuity, CLC bio and BIOBASE product lines. Ingenuity Variant Analysis is the world’s leading solution for analysis and interpretation of human sequencing data generated with NGS technologies. The web-based software leverages the Ingenuity Knowledge Base, a repository of expertly curated biological interactions and functional annotations created from millions of individually modeled relationships between proteins, genes, complexes, cells, tissues, drugs, and diseases. Data from more than 300,000 samples have so far been analyzed using Ingenuity Variant Analysis, which has helped to further expand the power of the Knowledge Base.

The agreement with GATC Biotech is non-exclusive, and financial terms were not disclosed.