Lausanne, May 6, 2020. Saphetor SA, a Swiss precision medicine company and the creator of VarSome, a suite of bioinformatics solutions for clinical applications, announced today a partnership with Paragon Genomics, a California-based company developing and commercializing rapid, easy-to-use, ultra-sensitive and ultra-high multiplex PCR-based target enrichment solutions for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS). Its ready-to-use and custom NGS panel solutions have enabled many lab-developed tests (LDTs) in the areas of infectious diseases, oncology, reproductive health, cardiology, and inherited diseases across the globe.
Saphetor’s VarSome Clinical is a clinically-certified CE-IVD and HIPAA-compliant platform empowering fast and accurate variant discovery, annotation, and interpretation of NGS data, which is now available to all Paragon Genomics’s customers, hence enabling medical doctors, geneticists, and biologists to process and interpret Paragon’s sequencing data more rapidly and precisely. The combined solution also supports Paragon’s proprietary technology for CleanPlex UMIs (Unique Molecular Identifiers) that is being adopted by an increasing number of clinical labs running cancer liquid biopsy NGS assays.
Furthermore, in the light of the current Covid-19 pandemic, Paragon has announced the SARS-CoV-2 Research and Surveillance Panel enabling complete genome sequencing of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19. The panel is available both for Illumina and MGI sequencing platforms.
Tao Chen, CEO of Paragon Genomics, said: ‘The partnership with Saphetor is a very important step in Paragon’s development and excellent news for the many healthcare professionals who need more accurate and faster data interpretation for targeted NGS panels. We’re delighted with today’s announcement’.
Tomas Kucera, Head of Business Development at Saphetor SA, commented: ‘We are very pleased to partner with Paragon Genomics and combine our offerings for the benefit of healthcare professionals worldwide. Furthermore, Paragon’s proprietary technology for UMIs is fully supported by VarSome Clinical, and the combined solution streamlines the detection of low-frequency variants and thus accelerates the adoption of liquid biopsy as a diagnostic tool for early detection and treatment of cancer.’
About Paragon Genomics
Paragon Genomics is a leader in amplicon-based target enrichment and library preparation solutions to accelerate the development of next-generation sequencing-based assays for research and clinical testing. The company designs and manufactures high performance and ultra-multiplexed amplicon NGS library preparation products for analyzing difficult, clinically relevant samples. It strives to be the NGS assay partner of choice for research and clinical NGS labs and to make custom NGS assays easily available to a broad range of users. Privately held Paragon Genomics is located in Hayward, California.
About Saphetor SA
Saphetor SA is a Swiss precision-medicine company dedicated to the large-scale identification and interpretation of human genetic variants by leveraging proprietary algorithms and expert domain knowledge. Saphetor is the creator of VarSome, a suite of intuitive and data-driven bioinformatics solutions both for clinicians and researchers. The VarSome.com Human Genomics Community is freely accessible, featuring a widely-recognized community-driven knowledge base that enables flexible queries across more than 50 genetic and genomic data resources. VarSome Clinical is the professional edition of VarSome with powerful functionality and further sophisticated data-mining and analysis tools. VarSome Clinical is a CE-IVD-certified and HIPAA-compliant platform allowing fast and accurate variant discovery, annotation, and interpretation of NGS data for whole genomes, exomes, and gene panels, which helps clinicians reach faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions for genetic conditions.
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