NOVEMBER 2023LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW 19By Peter René Hesse, Vice President Head of Genomics Business, QIAGENUNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF NEXT-GENERATION SEQUENCINGh arnessing the true potential of NGS in biological research requires fast, efficient solutions that reduce turnaround times and maximize sequencing capacity. "Missing an all-important variant can result in significant downstream consequences," says Peter Hesse, Vice President Head of Genomics at QIAGEN. That's why intelligent panel design and optimized chemistry are critical.The genomics market is broadening from specialized research into the high-value sectors of clinical, industrial and commercial applications driven by scientific discoveries, improving regulatory and reimbursement trends and technological innovation. In particular, clinical adoption continues to increase, but we are still in the first innings, and there is room to grow.QIAGEN is meeting the need for ever faster and more efficient solutions that maximize sequencing capacity through its portfolio strength on front-end sample processing and downstream bioinformatics and extensive application strength across all existing NGS platforms. Finding The Variant That MattersTargeted DNA sequencing has proved to be a powerful and precise method for identifying common and rare genetic variations. It relies on targeted DNA panels identifying mutations linked to certain diseases and disorders. This allows it to focus on specific regions of interest in the genome, enabling researchers to target specific genes, coding regions or even chromosomal segments. The process is quicker and more thorough than whole genome sequencing, but it also throws up challenges with regard to the workflow, results and analysis. Recognizing the demand for speed, QIAGEN optimized its targeted DNA sequencing technology to streamline the path to variant detection. It improved its chemistry to halve the time researchers need for the so-called library preparation of DNA samples down to just six hours. It also eliminated multiple tricky bead purification steps that make existing workflows more complex. As a result, QIAGEN's targeted sequencing workflows are less time-consuming, setting new industry standards in preparing samples to determine their nucleic acid sequences. Another major challenge for researchers using targeted sequencing is that all DNA fragments look identical, making it extremely difficult to distinguish sequencing errors from unique DNA molecules. PCR duplicates, false positives and library bias can undermine the quality of targeted sequencing data, limiting the authoritative detection of low-frequency DNA variants. To avoid these errors, QIAGEN's platform-agnostic targeted DNA Peter René HesseCXO INSIGHTS
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