Strand Genomics
Genomic Insights for Personalized Medical Diagnostics and Therapies

The implications of the world’s largest collaborative biological project in the year 2000—the Human Genome Project-combined with the Big Data revolution in the medical sciences holds out tremendous promise for human health. Recognizing the imminent need for the next generation of bioinformatics and genomics tools, four academic entrepreneurs from the prestigious Indian Institute of Science co-founded Strand Genomics Inc. (Strand). “Our focus is on personalized clinical genomics and molecular diagnostics. To address the grand challenge of the “$1000 genome and million dollar interpretation”, we have developed a clinical genomics interpretation and reporting platform, StrandOmics,” says Vijay Chandru, Ph.D, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Strand.

The StrandOmics platform works toward a world where one can foresee and possibly mitigate the occurrence of diseases that are either inherited or are at a major risk of developing. By focusing on clinical interpretation and reporting of genomic data, we can scan an individual’s genomic information and determine the likelihood of a person developing certain diseases,” says Chandru.

The core architecture of Strand’s products is a proprietary platform called AVADISTM, an acronym for Access, Visualize, Analyze, DIScover. These products include GeneSpring—a product for integrated biological research, StrandNGSTM—a pipeline package for Next Generation Sequencing data analysis from raw DNA sequence data alignment to variant calling and biological interpretation, iManageTM—a tool for large-scale biological image management, and a Virtual Liver to enable in silico toxicity screening.

The company’s GrammaticaTM is a proprietary natural language processing engine honed for the last 8 years for text written in English.

Strand is focused on fundamentally changing the diagnostics and treatment landscape

A dedicated team of over 45 scientists and clinicians manually curate the consolidated information read from Medline/Pubmed abstracts and full-length research articles into Strand’s proprietary database. This has enabled Strand to build a knowledge base of clinically relevant variants at a rate of 10,000 new variant references per month. Based on the proprietary platform’s streamlined report generation, pathologists and physicians can make diagnoses and informed treatment decisions by combining the patient’s biology with the biological mechanisms of available drugs and those in ongoing clinical trials.

Strand has organically grown in the computational biology and bioinformatics sector, with more than 200 multi disciplinary scientists working together with an appreciation for both laboratory processes and the software development life cycle.

The company’s clientele comprise of more than 2,000 academic and pharma labs, molecular diagnostics and pathology labs, community hospitals and oncology centers offering clinical genomics diagnostics which serve over 100,000 patients. The largest commercial adoption of genomics for tumor profiling in the world emerged from a unique case study conducted by Strand’s partnership with Health Care Global Enterprises in India. Using Strand’s clinical genomics solutions for oncology, which includes both cancer risk assessment from saliva DNA as well as molecular diagnosis, Strand and HCG together ran a pilot program on over 50 samples to demonstrate value to clinicians and patients. The results are very successful and HCG is in the process of making this profiling the standard of care for breast, ovarian, colorectal and lung cancers.

Strand’s NGS-based clinical diagnostics tests for cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases are driving the innovation to reduce costs and turnaround times by automating through the StrandOmics platform. “Strand is focused on fundamentally changing the diagnostics and treatment landscape. Our aim is to make genomic testing a part of routine medical care, thereby empowering clinicians to make more informed decisions and offering physicians, short and personalized patient reports,” concludes Dr. Chandru.