Strand Iris

Strand Iris is a clinical interpretation service developed by Strand Life Sciences for generating clinical reports from VCF or FASTQ files obtained through somatic NGS testing. It is designed for diagnostic companies and oncology clinical reporting teams seeking to accelerate variant interpretation and reporting workflows, with support for both somatic and germline testing contexts.

The Strand Iris rules engine and associated technology has been applied across more than 5,000 clinical reports, covering the range of subtleties encountered in oncology genomics. Strand Life Sciences also offers a broader set of NGS and PCR diagnostics services alongside Strand Iris, including dockerized PacBio workflows, variant curation and reporting, NGS assay validation, and software service teams.

Strand Iris: Core Capabilities

• Effect prediction for variants across 520 genes
• Therapy annotation with AMP tiers covering approximately 112 FDA-approved drugs and 748 targeted drugs
• Identification of relevant clinical trials from a database of approximately 68,000 clinical trials
• Accepts input from VCF or FASTQ files generated through somatic NGS testing
• Used by an internal oncology clinical reporting team to generate reporting-ready outputs

Variant Curation and Reporting

• Curation services informed by experience across tens of thousands of reports
• Variant curation performed under ACMG guidelines for germline variants and AMP guidelines for somatic variants
• Supports creation of curated variant databases for diagnostic companies
• Provides reporting-ready variant content for major diagnostics customers

Dockerized PacBio Workflows

• Unified Docker-based solution designed for long-read sequencing platforms, including Pacific Biosciences HiFi and Revio systems
• Addresses inconsistencies arising from tools with varying dependencies, configurations, and setups
• Supports consistent environments, parallel processing, and simplified command execution for genomic analysis

NGS Assay Validation (CAP/CLIA/CDx)

• Establishes limits of detection, sensitivity, specificity, and reproducibility for various variant types
• Covers somatic, germline, and liquid biopsy settings
• Generates data using control samples from commercial sources and an internal sample library
• Delivers analytical and clinical validation reports for CLIA, CAP, and New York State certification

Software Service Teams

• Deployment and scale-up of secondary analysis pipelines (FASTQ to variant calls)
• Streamlining of tertiary analysis workflows (variant calls to reports)
• Development of ordering and report delivery systems, including physician portals
• Support for research infrastructure such as electronic data capture systems and aggregate data pools for mining

Strand Life Sciences' services span the full NGS diagnostics workflow, from raw sequencing data through to clinical reporting, and are applicable to laboratory settings requiring CAP, CLIA, or CDx compliance. The platform and associated services are positioned for diagnostic companies looking to launch and validate NGS assays.