Venlo, the Netherlands, Jan. 04, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- QIAGEN (NYSE: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today 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.

More information on QDI: https://digitalinsights.qiagen.com/

About QIAGEN Digital Insights

QIAGEN Digital Insights, the bioinformatics business of QIAGEN, is the leading provider of genomic and clinical knowledge, analysis, and interpretation tools and services for scientists and clinicians. With over 25 years of industry experience, 90,000 users worldwide, more than 100,000 citations in scientific papers, over 3 million profiled patient cases, and over 40 billion scientific data points, QIAGEN Digital Insights delivers the omics knowledge to understand the unique biology of the disease and how to target the disease for Precision Medicine to Personalized Care.

About QIAGEN

QIAGEN N.V., a Netherlands-based holding company, is the leading global provider of Sample to Insight solutions that enable customers to gain valuable molecular insights from samples containing the building blocks of life. Our sample technologies isolate and process DNA, RNA and proteins from blood, tissue and other materials. Assay technologies make these biomolecules visible and ready for analysis. Bioinformatics software and knowledge bases interpret data to report relevant, actionable insights. Automation solutions tie these together in seamless and cost-effective workflows. QIAGEN provides solutions to more than 500,000 customers around the world in Molecular Diagnostics (human healthcare) and Life Sciences (academia, pharma R&D and industrial applications, primarily forensics). As of September 30, 2023, QIAGEN employed more than 6,000 people in over 35 locations worldwide. Further information can be found at http://www.qiagen.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

Certain statements contained in this press release may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. To the extent that any of the statements contained herein relating to QIAGEN's products, including those products used in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, timing for launch and development, marketing and/or regulatory approvals, financial and operational outlook, growth and expansion, collaborations, markets, strategy or operating results, including without limitation its expected adjusted net sales and adjusted diluted earnings results, are forward-looking, such statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that involve a number of uncertainties and risks. Such uncertainties and risks include, but are not limited to, risks associated with management of growth and international operations (including the effects of currency fluctuations, regulatory processes and dependence on logistics), variability of operating results and allocations between customer classes, the commercial development of markets for our products to customers in academia, pharma, applied testing and molecular diagnostics; changing relationships with customers, suppliers and strategic partners; competition; rapid or unexpected changes in technologies; fluctuations in demand for QIAGEN's products (including fluctuations due to general economic conditions, the level and timing of customers' funding, budgets and other factors); our ability to obtain regulatory approval of our products; difficulties in successfully adapting QIAGEN's products to integrated solutions and producing such products; the ability of QIAGEN to identify and develop new products and to differentiate and protect our products from competitors' products; market acceptance of QIAGEN's new products and the integration of acquired technologies and businesses; actions of governments, global or regional economic developments, weather or transportation delays, natural disasters, political or public health crises, including the breadth and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the demand for our products and other aspects of our business, or other force majeure events; as well as the possibility that expected benefits related to recent or pending acquisitions may not materialize as expected; and the other factors discussed under the heading “Risk Factors” contained in Item 3 of our most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F. For further information, please refer to the discussions in reports that QIAGEN has filed with, or furnished to, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.