Qiagen GeneRead DNAseq Leukemia V2 gene panel with SF3B1 biomarker

Qiagen has acquired an exclusive global licence to the biomarker SF3B1 from the University of Tokyo. The biomarker is included in the company’s GeneRead DNAseq Leukemia V2 gene panel for next-generation sequencing.

SF3B1 is believed to play a critical role in the prognosis of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), a group of haematological cancers in which bone marrow does not produce enough healthy blood cells. Mutations of the gene, which is an important component of the spliceosome machinery, indicate a more favourable disease progression for patients than the ‘wild-type’ gene, so testing for the gene variants could provide important guidance for treatment.

GeneRead technology provides a time-efficient approach for target enrichment of assay panels for NGS. The panels use as little as 10 ng of starting DNA material per pool, require only 3 h to enrich for targets and reduce the time to go from isolated DNA sample to sequencing-ready libraries. The panels are compatible for use with FFPE samples, do not require specialised instruments and achieve high coverage (>96% of coding regions), specificity (>90% of reads on target) and uniformity (>90% of bases covered by at least 20% of the mean coverage depth).