Vancouver, Canada – The International Consortium for Genetics of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, GND, will use the varvis software platform, developed by Limbus Medical Technologies GmbH, Germany, to collect and analyze several thousand whole exome and whole genome data sets.
Rami Abou Jamra, coordinator of the GND consortium from the University of Leipzig, Germany, explained: “We plan to collect many thousand cases of neurodevelopmental disorders, especially autosomal recessive intellectual disability. We plan to use the data to describe most of still unknown genes of autosomal recessive intellectual disability, and to describe networks of proteins and clustering of phenotypes. Our goal is to ease diagnosing cases of neurodevelopment disorders and thus to enable going to the next step; understanding the pathomechanisms of neurodevelopmental disorders. The varvis platform in combination with the allexes™ reference data network enables us to achieve this goal.”
Establishing members of the GND consortium are Rami Abou Jamra from University of Leipzig, Joseph Gleeson and Anne Gregor from Rockefeller University and UCSD, and Hans van Bokhoven and Arjan de Brouwer from Radboud University Medical Center. The GND consortium invites all interested scientists and physicians to participate in this international, academic, non-profit effort.
Ben Liesfeld, Managing Director and co-founder of Limbus, commented: “We are very excited to support such an ambitious and far-reaching project. Our software platform, a CE marked medical device software, has specifically been designed to support data collection and analysis at this scale. Our two-level data protection mechanism makes data exchange for this purpose possible at once.”
The data from GND will eventually augment the reference data that is available to Limbus customers through allexes.
About varvis: the clinical decision support system varvis, designed by Limbus Medical Technologies GmbH, Rostock, Germany, is a cloud-based software system to filter and evaluate genetic sequencing data and optimized for clinical workflows. varvis is a Class I medical device compliant with EU regulations. For more information about varvis, visit www.limbus-medtec.com.
About GND: The GND consortium is an academic and international initiative to advance knowledge of the causes of recessive neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). These include intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorders. GND aims at a large meta-analysis of whole exome or whole genome sequencing data. For more information, visit www.gnd.academy.