Ingenuity Systems Acquired by Qiagen, Adding Analysis, Interpretation of Complex Biologic Data Technology

Qiagen NV (Hilden, Germany) has acquired Ingenuity Systems, Inc. (Redwood City, CA, USA), a leading provider of biomedical software that effectively analyzes and interprets the biologic meaning of genomic data. Ingenuity has created a curated knowledge system of biomedical data and analysis solutions for the investigation, interpretation, and analysis of complex biologic systems.

New developments such as next-generation sequencing (NGS) are now generating more data in only one year than was generated in all prior history, making the analysis and interpretation of this wide-ranging and very complex biologic data a critical success factor.

At the core of Ingenuity’s product range is the Ingenuity Knowledge Base, a 14-year endeavor to effectively and manually curate, model, and computationally structure the immense amount of biomedical literature, including genomic variations associated with human disease and thousands of disease models. The Ingenuity Knowledge Base and software applications enable users to accurately interpret the significance of increasingly large amounts of biologic data to better direct research and medical treatment decisions.

Ingenuity’s Knowledge Base is constructed on algorithms that pair all human gene variants with biologic interpretations based on known outcomes and discoveries. These pairings are gathered and reviewed by specialists (curated) in a standardized way from a wide range of sources including clinical and scientific publications with the support of advanced technology and refined processes. This process and the associated learning algorithms translate sourced data into interoperable and linkable collections of relevant information.

The Ingenuity product range includes the Ingenuity pathways analysis (IPA) standard web-based software application, which enables researchers to model, analyze, and determine the complex biologic systems at the core of life sciences research. IPA is deployed in most major pharmaceutical companies and hundreds of biotechnology companies and academic institutions globally. It supports data analysis and interpretation from all high-throughput analysis platforms and it is used in virtually all areas of drug discovery and development from target identification and validation to predictive toxicology, biomarkers, and pharmacogenomics.

Ingenuity variant analysis is a web-based NGS data analysis application that solves a vital requirement for researchers trying to rapidly identify relevant causal variants in human diseases in a matter of hours. It enables customers to rapidly identify and prioritize variants by drilling down to a small, targeted subset of compelling variants based upon published biologic evidence and their own knowledge of disease biology. Users can also probe variants from multiple biologic standpoints, examine different biologic theories, and identify the most promising variants for follow-up analysis.

Up to now, thousands of users from leading institutions around the world have already uploaded genomic data using Ingenuity variant analysis, which has been used to analyze more than 45,000 biologic samples. In February 2013, Ingenuity had passed an audit under the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and complies with the US-EU Safe Harbor framework.

Ingenuity will substantially expand and strengthen Qiagen’s own curated database, which is embedded in wet lab assays and marketed through Qiagen’s GeneGlobe content portal. GeneGlobe offers hundreds of assay panels for polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and NGS as well as more than 60,000 fully annotated molecular assays for the most sought-after diseases and pathways, curated from the biomedical literature.