Strand Life Sciences Creates Another Global Bioinformatics Landmark With Strand Ramanujan

Strand NGS 3.0 release with processing improvements promise 2x speedup compared to the global benchmark

March 31, 2017 | Bangalore, India

Strand Life Sciences today announced the release of version 3.0 of its flagship, next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis and visualization 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.

This 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 A.K. 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% on the entire call set and 97/ 92% on InDels, and powerful visualizations 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% 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, Chairman and Managing Director, Strand Life Sciences. In partnership with India’s largest cancer specialty hospital network, Health Care Global (HCG), Strand Ramanujan will create a clinical genomics data bank that will advance genomic medicine in oncology.

About Strand Ramanujan

Strand Ramanujan is representative of India’s ability to produce world-class AI platforms to aid in disease prevention, diagnostics, and treatment, and capable of competing with the likes of IBM (Watson Health^TM) and GE (Predix®). At the core of Ramanujan, is Strand’s proprietary natural language processing (NLP) platform Grammatica that powers Strand’s products, including the market-leading gene expression analysis software GeneSpring (marketed by Agilent Technologies, Inc.), Strand NGS, the powerful NGS data analysis and visualization platform, and StrandOmics, enabling fast and accurate clinical variant interpretation and reporting.

About Strand NGS

Strand NGS offers highly accurate and visualization-rich workflows for alignment, DNA-Seq, RNA-Seq, small RNA-Seq, ChIP-Seq, Methyl and MeDIP-Seq experiments, with a best- in- class, feature-rich elastic genome browser. Strand NGS allows scientists to better comprehend their NGS data by using the tertiary biological interpretation features.

About Strand Life Sciences

Strand Life Sciences is a global genomic profiling and bioinformatics company established in 2000. Strand is a leader in precision medicine diagnostics, aimed at empowering cancer care and genetic testing for inherited diseases. Strand works with oncologists, pathologists, geneticists, and hospitals to enable faster clinical decision support for accurate molecular diagnosis, prognosis, therapy recommendations, and clinical trials. Strand’s lab in India is a CAP & NABL accredited NGS laboratory.

For more information, visit www.strandls.com