The Director General
of Indian Council for
Medical Research, Dr
Soumya Swaminathan
commented: “This is a
step in a new direction.
India has immense
potential in clinical
research, drug and
device manufacturing
and we would like to see
more of these types of
partnerships to happen
within the country to
realize the ‘Make in India’
dream. We are keen that
ICMR becomes more
collaborative and partners
with organizations in this
direction and mutually
expand capacities
through cross-functional
partnerships”.
Strand Life Sciences
creates global
bioinformatics
landmark with
Strand Ramanujan
Strand Life Sciences has
announced the release
of version 3.0 of its
flagship, next-generation
sequencing (NGS) data
analysis and visualization
platform, Strand NGS.
Benchmarked against
the world’s best, major
enhancements in this
release have led to
significant improvements
in accuracy, precision
and speed of NGS
data analysis at
scientists’ fingertips.
This latest release adds
considerable value to the
Strand stack of artificial
intelligence (AI)-powered
bioinformatics and
text mining, as applied
in NGS data analysis
that underpins clinical
variant interpretation and
reporting. Over a period
of 15 years, Strand has
continuously built on and
leveraged its proprietary
AI platform, christened
“Ramanujan” after
two great intellectuals
of Indian origin: S.
Ramanujan (1887-
1920) the genius
mathematician who
greatly contributed
to number theory
which has regained
new significance
in the age of computer
technology and A.K.
Ramanujan (1929-1993),
the literature scholar and
linguist extraordinaire.
properly understood.
NICED comes with a
variety of strengths in
research and developing
strategies for treatment,
prevention and control
of enteric infections,”
mentioned Dr Davinder
Gill in his comments,
while addressing the
press conference at the
signing-in ceremony. He
added, “This will also
be a strategic shift for
Hilleman, since till now,
our focus has been to
optimise existing vaccines
and address the gaps in
low resource settings.
We will now endeavour
to develop an entirely
new line of treatment
and we look forward to
jointly abating this fatal
disease which threatens
the Nation’s health”.
The key highlight of this
Strand NGS v3.0 release
is a DNA-Seq workflow
that is 1.5 to two times
faster than the BWA-
GATK best practices
workflow including
increased accuracy for
variant calling with
precision/recall rates
as high as 99/ 98% on
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