BioVoice News May 2017 Issue 12 Volume 1 | Page 37

liquid-biopsy-based tumor monitoring. Beyond that, pro-active gathering of clinical history and outcomes information combined with the molecular information that Strand identifies from its sequencing tests can lead to powerful insights and help inform the creation of India specific guidelines. All this is enabled by StrandOmics, our proprietary platform for interpretation and reporting. StrandOmics integrates knowledge from all the public databases of variant-phenotype correlates along with knowledge curated from published literature using text mining and expert curation by highly skilled senior scientists at Strand. Over 6,000 clinical samples have been taken through the platform and this has contributed to a pooled database of Indian (South Asian) ethnicity genomes. As our tests are being adopted as standard of care in leading cancer hospitals, we believe that Strand can rapidly build a clinical genomics database at a scale which could make India a future leader in onco- genomic medicine. What would be the top five priorities of Strand Life Sciences during 2017 and next few years? Strand Life Sciences will continue to expand its portfolio of products on both the Bioinformatics and Clinical Diagnostics side. The science behind both fields is constantly evolving with new research insights being published every day, so in order to keep up with these advances and to stay relevant for our customers our products have to evolve, too. Apart from expansion, there is always scope to enhance scientific depth and accuracy as the science and technology progress and hence a lot of our R&D efforts will be focused in this direction. On the clinical diagnostics side, while we get benchmarked against the world’s best, we also believe in the “Make in India” mandate, in particular, providing our products at affordable cost is a serious part of our vision. We plan to expand reach by ensuring that our product network is made wider by reaching multi- specialty doctors and larger number of hospitals in India. Strand beli eves BIOVOICENEWS.COM 37