Industry News: New Agreements Underscore QIAGEN’s Leadership in Bioinformatics

QIAGEN N.V. has announced new partnerships to enhance the profile and expand the use of its market leading bioinformatics solutions for microbiome, metagenomics and other applications.

QIAGEN Bioinformatics signed an agreement with genomics big data company CosmosID, Inc. to allow users of QIAGEN’s CLC Genomics Workbench to access and integrate CosmosID’s metagenomics analysis platform into their QIAGEN bioinformatics platform. CosmosID’s platform allows users to identify and characterize microbial communities from whole genome shotgun data and to determine their relative abundance. The new plug-in expands the range of metagenomic and microbiome applications supported by QIAGEN’s microbial genomics solution enabling researchers in fields such as infectious disease, animal health, agriculture, environmental and food safety to use shotgun metagenomics analysis for routine testing employing next-generation sequencing.

Metagenomics and microbiome research, which look at the impact of microbial diversity on environment and human health, are growing very rapidly. At the end of 2015, QIAGEN acquired MO BIO Laboratories, Inc., a leader in sample technologies for microbiomes.

Furthermore, QIAGEN announced a contract awarded to its partner Trigent Solutions Inc. that enables streamlined access to QIAGEN’s bioinformatics solutions for centers of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Products available to FDA centers include software for infectious disease research and outbreak analysis, such as CLC Genomics Workbench, CLC Microbial Genomics Module, CLC Genome Finishing Module, as well as solutions in human genomics, such as Biomedical Genomics Workbench, Ingenuity^® Variant Analysis™, and Ingenuity^® Pathway Analysis™.

The contract expands QIAGEN’s long-standing bioinformatics relationship with the FDA from one Center of Excellence to seven centers, spanning human health and food safety applications. The products and services provided to the FDA also enable uploading and sharing of public health data with U.S. and international institutions via the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) SRA database of biological sequencing data to combat infectious outbreaks both on national and global levels.

“We are excited about the latest agreements”, said Dr. Laura Furmanski, Senior Vice President and head of QIAGEN’s Bioinformatics Business Area. “They are leveraging the reach and profile of our leading portfolio of bioinformatics solutions that enable a growing number of customers to analyze vast amounts of data from next-generation sequencing – and to arrive at actionable insights.”