Qiagen, Hilden, Germany, has announced enhancements to its clinical decision support system, Qiagen Clinical Insight (QCI), which streamlines the annotation, interpretation, and reporting of next-generation sequencing (NGS) results for clinical laboratories.

Launched earlier this year, the QCI bioinformatics platform has been expanded from interpreting NGS data on somatic mutations in solid tumor cancers to add leukemia and lymphoma testing, as well as testing for hereditary cancer indications.

Designed and validated in collaboration with clinical laboratories at organizations such as Baylor College of Medicine, Laboratory Corporation of America (LabCorp), Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Virginia Commonwealth University, QCI is intended to enable labs to provide valuable molecular insights.

“While instrument and assay costs have declined, clinical testing laboratories still face bottlenecks from the complexity and cost of interpreting and reporting NGS data,” says Laura Furmanski, PhD, executive vice president and head of the bioinformatics business area at Qiagen. “Our team took a customer-centered approach to solving these challenges, collaborating with more than 50 labs to develop and validate QCI for each test indication.”

For somatic cancer indications, QCI enhancements include insights for diagnostic testing as well as therapy monitoring and disease progression, support for copy number variations and fusion genes, and additional prognostics data from the literature.

To complement its wide coverage of pertinent literature references and reported case databases, QCI now provides comprehensive coverage of drugs approved by FDA and the European Medicines Agency, professional clinical guidelines, and active genotype-related clinical trials.

The enhancements to QCI’s coverage also add 32 hereditary cancer genes, enabling laboratories to interpret and report on germline variants, and including support for NGS comprehensive cancer panel testing for both somatic and inherited cancers. QCI now includes curation of the hereditary cancer literature and curated clinical case counts for common heritable cancers, including ataxia telangiectasia, breast cancer, familial prostate cancer, hereditary diffuse gastric cancer, Lynch syndrome, neurofibromatosis, ovarian cancer, Peutz-Jeghers syndrome, and polyposis.

For more information, visit Qiagen.