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