QIAGEN NV, Hilden, Germany, has acquired Ingenuity Systems Inc, Redwood City, Calif—a provider of software solutions to analyze and interpret the biological meaning of genomic data—for $105 million.
The Silicon Valley-based software company has created an expertly curated knowledge system of biomedical information and analysis solutions for the exploration, interpretation, and analysis of complex biological systems.
New technologies such as next-generation sequencing (NGS) are now generating more data in a single year than was created in all prior history, making the analysis and interpretation of this extensive and very complex biological data a critical success factor.
The foundation of Ingenuity’s product portfolio is the Ingenuity Knowledge Base, a 14-year effort to accurately, manually curate, model, and computationally structure the vast amount of biomedical literature, including genomic variations implicated in human disease and thousands of disease models. The Ingenuity Knowledge Base and software applications enable users to accurately interpret the meaning of increasingly large amounts of biological data to better guide scientific experiments and medical treatment decisions.
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“The interpretation of biological information is becoming a cornerstone of QIAGEN’s ecosystem of Sample & Assay Technologies for molecular testing—both in life sciences research and in diagnostics. Integration of Ingenuity’s solutions into a powerful, full-range ecosystem of QIAGEN’s molecular testing solutions, such as PCR and next-generation sequencing, promises to offer significant value to QIAGEN customers and shareholders.”—Peer M. Schatz, CEO, QIAGEN NV |
Ingenuity’s Knowledge Base is built on algorithms that pair all human gene variants with biological interpretations based on known outcomes and findings. These pairings are collected and reviewed by experts (curated) in a standardized way from a wide range of sources including clinical and scientific publications with the support of advanced technology and refined processes. This process and the associated learning algorithms translate sourced data into interoperable and linkable collections of relevant information. The leadership of Ingenuity’s products grows out of a long-standing commitment to ensure the highest standards, particularly in the use of expert teams, supported by the most advanced technology.
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“Today we can sequence an entire human genome in just a couple of days for less than a few thousand dollars, but the data analysis can take from months to years. The Ingenuity suite of products enables this rapid and accurate interpretation in a matter of minutes, and this is fundamentally impacting scientific research and the ability to diagnose and manage patient care.”—Jake Leschly, president and CEO, Ingenuity Systems. |
Ingenuity is also developing a new product to enable broader adoption of NGS in molecular diagnostics by offering an optimized and scalable solution for interpreting and scoring clinical variants identified by sequencing-based molecular diagnostic tests. The company has been actively forming relationships with reference labs to bring the power of this technology to these customers, including through cloud-based applications.
Ingenuity will significantly expand and strengthen QIAGEN’s own curated database, which is commercialized embedded in wet lab assays sold through QIAGEN’s GeneGlobe content portal. GeneGlobe offers hundreds of assay panels for PCR and NGS as well as more than 60,000 fully annotated molecular assays for the most sought-after diseases and pathways, curated from the biomedical literature.
Ingenuity’s solutions are used by tens of thousands of researchers and clinicians at hundreds of leading pharmaceutical, biotechnology, academic, diagnostic, and clinical institutions worldwide.
[Source: QIAGEN]
