Strand Life Sciences releases version 3.0 of Strand NGS

Strand Life Sciences announced the release of version 3.0 of its flagship, next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis and visualisation platform, Strand NGS. Benchmarked against the world’s best, major enhancements in this release have led to significant improvements in accuracy, precision and speed of NGS data analysis at scientists’ fingertips.

The latest release adds considerable value to the Strand stack of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bioinformatics and text mining, as applied in NGS data analysis that underpins clinical variant interpretation and reporting. Over a period of 15 years, Strand has continuously built on and leveraged its proprietary AI platform, christened ‘Ramanujan’ after two great intellectuals of Indian origin: S Ramanujan (1887-1920) the genius mathematician who greatly contributed to number theory which has regained new significance in the age of computer technology and AK Ramanujan (1929-1993), the literature scholar and linguist extraordinaire.

The key highlight of this Strand NGS v3.0 release is a DNA-Seq workflow that is 1.5 to two times faster than the BWA-GATK best practices workflow including increased accuracy for variant calling with precision/recall rates as high as 99/ 98 per cent on the entire call set and 97/ 92 per cent on InDels, and powerful visualisations for each step that are not present in GATK.

Other improvements include:

• A ‘one shot pipeline execution option’ to help researchers and core facilities complete reiterative NGS analyses in just a few clicks
• Improved RNA-Seq workflow processing speed with observed speedups of up to 110 per cent in RNA transcriptome alignment.
• Full support for HGVS notation to describe variants in standard international nomenclature of variant reporting and information exchange in DNA diagnostics.

"Anticipating the latest developments in genomics and healthcare, Strand has become a global leader in providing cutting-edge platforms for scientists, clinical laboratories, hospitals and doctors. The platforms span next-generation genomics data analysis, clinical variant interpretation and reporting. Today, Strand Ramanujan is used by Strand to enable clinicians to integrate phenotype information with all other clinical reporting for more effective application in monitoring and screening of disease progression and recurrence," said Dr Vijay Chandru, CMD, Strand Life Sciences. In partnership with India’s largest cancer speciality hospital network, Health Care Global (HCG), Strand Ramanujan will create a clinical genomics data bank that will advance genomic medicine in oncology.