Children's National Launches Sequencing Program Featuring Illumina's NextSeq And GenomOncology's GO Clinical Workbench

CLEVELAND, March 19, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- GenomOncology LLC announced today that Children's National Health System has launched a clinical sequencing program that is utilizing GenomOncology's GO Clinical Workbench.  The workflow of the GO Clinical Workbench has been extended to address the needs of the constitutional pediatrics market.

Seeing the need to internalize testing, Dr. Sean Hofherr, Director of Molecular Diagnostics made the business case to launch an internal clinical sequencing program in the Division of Laboratory Medicine at Children's National Health System in Washington, DC.  Their first clinically available test menu utilizes the Illumina NextSeq500 and TruSight One library enrichment.  After assessing the market, Dr. Hofherr decided to work with GenomOncology to extend the GO Clinical Workbench to Children National's workflow.

"We are excited to launch Children's National's Pediatric Genomic Initiative to address the nearly 1000 clinical sequencing tests sent out each year by our institution, many only ordered a single time in the year.  Turn around time and cost savings were a priority, but the main driving factors were the ability to use the patients' electronic health records to aid in the interpretation of variants and direct communication with the ordering physicians.  This new program will provide better laboratory services to the patients of our hospital. This program is one of the first in the world to launch clinical testing based on a medical exome (4,813 genes) to carve out personalized sequencing panels (PSPs) that can be customized by clinical presentation, and we are extremely pleased with the results. GenomOncology has tailored the GO Clinical Workbench specifically to our needs and laboratory workflow including the ability to generate our PSP offerings by gene list, clinical indication, and by leveraging our chromosomal microarray data to guide testing," said Dr. Hofherr.

GenomOncology enabled this program in several ways, starting with data analysis support to complete the assay validation of the TruSight One panel. An ordering portal was developed to allow physicians, medical geneticists, and genetic counselors to order tests based on phenotype information, known sets of genes, and defined panels. This ordering portal also allows the laboratory to upload Array CGH data and filter by detected regions of interest. Finally, the GO Clinical Workbench was modified to support the American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) reporting guidelines.

"Laboratories using the latest techniques in genomics play a crucial role in the development of new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for a wide range of diseases," added Manuel Glynias, President and CEO of GenomOncology. "We are proud that the talented team at Children's National will be working with the GO Clinical Workbench to advance patient treatment through the use of next generation sequencing."

GenomOncology's GO Clinical Workbench streamlines the use of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) data in conjunction with other analytic modalities and allows laboratories to produce an actionable clinical report. The platform is configured to each clinical laboratory's specific needs with systems integration (LIMS, EMR, etc.), setting of quality control and annotation parameters, and design of the resultant clinical report.

About GenomOncology

GenomOncology is enabling precision medicine by translating next generation sequencing data into actionable information for clinicians and researchers. In collaboration with molecular pathologists and physicians, GenomOncology has developed the GO Clinical Workbench, a decision support tool with a step-by-step workflow that takes raw data from the sequencer and translates the specific molecular profile of a sample into an actionable clinical report.  GenomOncology's research platform allows scientists to analyze one or hundreds of genomes simultaneously to look for causal variants, reducing the time required to understand the genomic alterations that lead to new discoveries. More information can be found on the company's website at www.genomoncology.com.

For more information regarding this announcement, please contact:

Jeanne Paras
Phone: 440-617-6087
Email:  jeanne@genomoncology.com 

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SOURCE GenomOncology