NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Maverix Biomics announced today that it has signed a non-exclusive co-marketing agreement with Qiagen to integrate the Maverix Analytic platform with Qiagen's Ingenuity iReport biological data interpretation solution.
According to the company, its platform will complement Qiagen's sample-to-insight workflow by providing easy, three-step, push-button data analysis that includes tools for genome alignment that will help researchers obtain biological meaning from expression data and better understand what may impact disease pathways.
Ramon Felciano, co-founder and senior vice president at Qiagen Redwood City, said in a statement that the combination of iReport and the Maverix Biomics platform "provides our mutual customers a new and enhanced solution that enables them to quickly achieve actionable insights that will ultimately accelerate their advancement into a clinical or diagnostic environment."
Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Qiagen acquired Ingenuity Systems earlier this year for $105 million. The deal provided the firm with a portfolio of informatics products including the Ingenuity Knowledge Base, which together with software applications, allow researchers to interpret large amounts of biological data in order to guide scientific experiments and medical treatment decisions.
Qiagen followed that acquisition with the recent purchase of Danish bioinformatics firm CLC Bio.
In a separate announcement today, Qiagen said that it has begun enrolling molecular diagnostics laboratories in an early-access program for a new "web-based solution to deliver faster, easier-to-use and high-confidence clinical interpretation and reporting of observed gene variants in data from next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based tests." It said that among the early-access users are Partners Healthcare, Emory Genetics Laboratory, and GeneDx, among a number of other commercial and academic labs.
Qiagen also said that it has formed the Ingenuity Scientific Advisory Board, which will advise and assist the firm in research and product development initiatives focused on clinical applications. Among the members of the board are Sherri Bale of GeneDx, Elaine Mardis from The Genome Institute at Washington University School of Medicine, and Eric Schadt, director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology.