BY RAHUL KOUL
bio chat
“ STRAND NGS 3.0 ALLOWS USERS TO ANALYZE DATA AT NEARLY TWICE THE SPEED ”
The Bangalore based Strand Life Sciences has been recently in news for the back to back launch of two innovative products . One is the next generation sequencing tool , Ramanujan and second is the liquid biopsy test for the cancer diagnosis . In an exclusive interview with the BioVoice News , Dr Vijay Chandru , Chairman and Managing Director of the company shared detailed insights on the products and the overall trends . Read the interesting biochat in two parts :
BY RAHUL KOUL
Congratulations on the release of new 3.0 version of your NGS Platform . Why did you choose to name it as Ramanujan ? How is it novel or remarkable as compared to imported technologies ?
Thank you . Our NGS platform , Strand NGS , is just one part of the Strand Ramanujan stack of artificial-intelligence ( AI ) powered platforms created and marketed by Strand Life Sciences . Strand Ramanujan is representative of India ’ s ability to produce worldclass AI platforms to aid in disease prevention , diagnostics , and treatment , and capable of competing with the likes of IBM ( Watson HealthTM ) and GE ( Predix ®).
Over a period of 15 years , Strand has continuously built on and leveraged this stack of AI platforms , christened “ Ramanujan ” after two great intellectuals of Indian origin for their mathematical and linguistic prowess : 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 . At the core of Ramanujan , is Strand ’ s proprietary natural language processing ( NLP ) platform Grammatica that powers Strand ’ s products , including the marketleading gene expression analysis software GeneSpring ( marketed by Agilent Technologies , Inc .), Strand NGS , the powerful NGS data analysis and visualization platform , and StrandOmics , enabling fast and accurate clinical variant interpretation and reporting .
The remarkable
34 BioVoiceNews | May 2017