Sophia Genetics, a Switzerland-based cloud-native software company in the healthcare space, has announced a new partnership with Qiagen that will pair QIAseq reagent technology with the SOPHiA DDM platform to enhance tumour analysis through next-generation sequencing (NGS).

The partnership will allow customers to order QIAseq panels that can be processed through SOPHiA DDM, a cloud-based platform that analyses data from various sources to enable entirely new research perspectives. The partnership will initially support somatic variant detection (an alteration in DNA that occurs after birth) using QIAseq Targeted DNA Pro panels for homologous recombination repair (HRR), a special type of biomarker test to find tumors that have certain mutations that may make them sensitive to PARP inhibitors in oncology

The partnership with Sophia Genetics is planned to be expanded to other areas of analysis, including the use of QIAseq panels custom-made solutions. It is the inaugural partnership in Qiagen’s QIAseq Platform Partnership.

NGS has the potential to revolutionise the diagnosis and treatment of cancers and rare diseases but creates extremely large, complex, and noisy datasets for analysis. Without the right analytical technology, pinpointing causative variants and obtaining actionable insights from NGS data requires specialist skills, multiple resources, and considerable time.