QIAGEN announced a strategic plan to step up investments over the next five years in its market-leading QIAGEN Digital Insights (QDI) business.

These investments will support QDI, the bioinformatics market leader with sales of approximately $100 million in 2023, to expand its offerings in new geographic regions and market segments while delivering enhanced customer insights and new products.

Among the milestones are plans to launch at least five new products, along with new enhancements to the portfolio of existing products. These include plans for additional knowledge bases in the field of Omics, which involves the collective study of biological molecules such as genes, proteins and metabolites.

The investment will also extend QDI’s existing augmented molecular intelligence approach with additional Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, and also a new regulatory-compliant secondary analysis solution for rapid next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis within clinical labs.

“Our significant investments into QDI demonstrate our commitment to accelerating growth and promoting innovation in the bioinformatics market. Based on the track record of double-digit sales growth combined with a high level of profitability in our bioinformatics business, we believe now is the optimal time to invest,” said Thierry Bernard, Chief Executive Officer of QIAGEN. “As the bioinformatics market continues to consolidate, and we review various opportunities that complement our portfolio, our investments into this area will further strengthen QDI’s position and strengthen our reach to customers seeking to unlock valuable insights from complex genomic data.”

Jonathan Sheldon, Senior Vice President of QIAGEN Digital Insights, said, “For over two decades, we have leveraged human capabilities along with powerful machines to build the world’s largest molecular intelligence knowledge base. This new wave of investments will enhance our leadership with AI and NLP capabilities, enabling access to a broader range of high-quality information for improved interpretation of complex genomic data. Furthermore, we want to provide an even more seamless and complete solution for all types of NGS data interpretation – in both somatic and hereditary testing – by delivering new regulatory-compliant clinical secondary analysis solutions that are integrated with our leading QCI Interpret software.” 

QDI’s growth strategy focuses on these key areas: 

• Accelerating access to new Omics knowledge bases: QDI will expand its knowledge base and enter adjacent markets with additional Omics and data science resources, offering customers a more comprehensive understanding of diseases, drug targets, and treatments essential to precision medicine and precision care.
• Enhancing AI and NLP capabilities: QDI will extend further its investment in AI and NLP capacities to advance existing capabilities within products and grow the QDI Knowledge Base with new content for more complete and confident insights into complex genomic data. By continuing to advance human-curated and AI-derived content, QDI delivers trusted, high-quality molecular intelligence to augment and accelerate decisions.
• Expanding its footprint for clinical secondary analysis: QDI plans to develop and launch a compliant cloud-based turn-key secondary analysis solution that is easy for small and medium-sized labs to adopt, based on QDI’s CLC and Lightspeed technology. QDI will also partner with sequencing platform providers to offer bundled interpretation packages that include the secondary analysis and NGS interpretation report workflows.
• Strengthening commercial presence and data center infrastructure: QDI will significantly invest in its commercial team and enhance its data center infrastructure, which currently comprises seven data centers worldwide and will soon be expanded to eight, to broaden reach and boost market penetration for both existing and new products. 

As a pioneer in bioinformatics, QDI enables researchers and clinicians to access advanced tools for data processing and interpretation, empowering them to make well-informed decisions that lead to improved research results. QDI offers automated workflows, scalability, and efficient turnaround times, as well as solutions tailored to fit any lab, database, API, service, or workflow application. Importantly, QDI’s Knowledge Base allows biologists to drive confident analysis and interpretation without requiring bioinformatics expertise.