QIAGEN Integrates Content from BIOBASE with Its Leading Offering for Biological Data Interpretation

• New biomedical content resources strengthen QIAGEN’s industry-leading bioinformatics portfolio
• Expansion will offer clinical researchers the most comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date literature source for gene variant and disease phenotype associations
• Expert-curated hereditary variants from HGMD are now available to customers using QIAGEN’s Ingenuity Variant Analysis – shows commitment to use synergies for rapid integration.

QIAGEN N.V. has announced the expansion of its industry-leading portfolio of bioinformatics solutions with additional content from BIOBASE, a provider of expertly curated biological databases, software and services. With access to HGMD, an especially in clinical markets widely used biomedical data resource as well as to other unique content, QIAGEN expand its world’s most comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date literature source for clinical research and diagnosis – further strengthening its market-leading position in the analysis and interpretation of sequencing data. QIAGEN’s growing bioinformatics and next-generation sequencing (NGS) franchises is positioned to benefit from the integration of BIOBASE, its assets and employees and will benefit the expansion of relationships with thousands of clinical labs and NGS users in life sciences.

“The ability of next-generation sequencing to rapidly deliver genomic insights is opening up new frontiers for clinical research and medicine, and QIAGEN is strategically addressing customers’ needs to interpret the massive amounts of data generated by NGS. With HGMD and other content from BIOBASE, a respected organization with a dedicated team and robust line of unique databases and software, QIAGEN is further extending its competitive advantage as the overall market leader for clinical interpretation of human sequencing data,” said Peer M. Schatz, Chief Executive Officer of QIAGEN. “Already today, more than 15,000 users worldwide rely on QIAGEN’s bioinformatics products for interpretation – and have processed over of over a quarter of a million genome sequences. HGMD is a unique fit with our offering and will integrate well. We expect to drive additional adoption of this leading literature-based knowledge base used by clinical reference labs for annotating hereditary variants, as well as BIOBASE’ other solutions by having integrated them into interpretation solutions shared with our Ingenuity Knowledge Base – adding value for QIAGEN and BIOBASE customers and accelerating our growth drivers in NGS and bioinformatics.”

BIOBASE offers well-structured interpretation solutions assembled by highly qualified subject-matter experts and organized in an accessible and easily searchable manner that enables scientists and clinical labs to identify connections between disparate pieces of information and apply that knowledge. In addition to continuing to market BIOBASE products on a standalone basis, QIAGEN already began integrating first products into QIAGEN’s expanding Ingenuity Knowledge Base and the QIAGEN bioinformatics solutions that draw upon it, including:

• HGMD® Human Gene Mutation Database – providing comprehensive data on human inherited disease mutations. Widely used in human genetics research, diagnostics and personal genomics, HGMD enables quick access to single mutation queries and advanced search applications.
• PGMD™ PharmacoGenomic Mutation Database – identifying all published gene variants that have been shown to affect drug response in patients, with multiple delivery models for accessing this data, including an intuitive exploratory interface and a data download for in-house analysis systems.

"Interpretation of sequencing data requires access to high-quality, expert-curated content to be able to quickly and reliably assess the most up-to-date information about variants and associated phenotypes from sequencing data", said Madhuri Hegde, Executive Director, Emory Genetics Laboratory. "Integrating BIOBASE content offerings such as HGMD and PGMD into QIAGEN's growing informatics portfolio and leveraging it with industry leading tools like Ingenuity Variant Analysis and Ingenuity Clinical will be invaluable to clinical labs launching sequence-based diagnostic tests."

HGMD integration is now available to customers of QIAGEN’s Ingenuity Variant Analysis. Rapid further integration of BIOBASE solutions with QIAGEN’s Ingenuity Knowledge Base will help create a springboard for Ingenuity® Clinical, QIAGEN’s forthcoming clinical NGS decision-support solution. Ingenuity Clinical is a new web-based solution to deliver faster, easier-to-use and high-confidence clinical interpretation and reporting of insights from NGS-based tests. More than 20 clinical testing laboratories are taking part in an early access program for Ingenuity Clinical, which is specifically designed to address challenges of scale, speed and decision support for healthcare laboratories adopting NGS. At the same time, free academic versions of HGMD and PGMD as well as other leading products such as Proteome and Transfac will remain available.