This story has been updated from an earlier version to include additional information provided by a Qiagen spokesperson.
NEW YORK – Qiagen on Thursday said that it has launched a "Digital Insights Partnership" program designed to expand the market for its bioinformatics products through various third-party collaborations and deals.
Under the program, Qiagen is inviting vendors to offer "complementary products and content" alongside Qiagen's existing portfolio of informatics products, which include its Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), OmicSoft, CLC Genomics Workbench, and Qiagen Clinical Insight Interpret. "Vendors can co-sell, resell, and bundle Qiagen Digital Insights software with their own product offering for a more compelling sample-to-insight for customers" the company said in a statement.
The first partners in the program include Thermo Fisher Scientific, GNS Healthcare, DNAnexus, Personal Genome Diagnostics (PGDx), and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Qiagen's partnership with Thermo Fisher, previously undisclosed, will see the companies comarket the CLC Genomics Workbench and Ion AmpliSeq SARS CoV-2 panel in order to facilitate rapid analysis and comparison of new strains of the virus in the population. The agreement also includes the co-marketing of the QCI Interpret product for interpreting hereditary diseases and whole-exome variants generated from analysis of the AmpliSeq-on-Demand and Ion AmpliSeq Exome sequencing panels.
In a deal originally announced in January, GNS Healthcare will offer AI-based products and services, including its Gemini "in silico patient," to help customers discover new targets and identify prognostic markers using the knowledgebase that makes up Qiagen's IPA and QCI Interpret.
DNAnexus, meanwhile, has agreed to provide a fully integrated cloud solution for data analysis and clinical interpretation of genomic tests using Qiagen's software. The agreement builds on a partnership between the companies that dates back to at least 2015. In an email, a Qiagen spokesperson noted that the new partnership is leveraging DNANexus' infrastructure to help clinical testing labs carry out hereditary and somatic NGS interpretation using QCI Interpret and QCI Interpret One.
"The new solution addresses the need for smaller clinical testing labs without infrastructure to rapidly adopt seamless and integrated secondary analysis and interpretation quickly with minimal set up and resources," the spokesperson said. "All support, maintenance, and license costs are all combined into a single cost per sample for each interpretation."
And, as previously reported, PGDx will package and resell QCI Interpret One for rapid, evidence-based reporting for its sequencing-based PGDx Elio oncology tests; while Qiagen has assumed commercial sales of Wellcome Sanger's COSMIC database.