SEQUOIA Team
Members
The Sequencing and Oncological Informatics Academic (SEQUOIA) Team is an academic, non-commercial clinical NGS user group that was established in 2017. It is a consortium of Molecular Pathologists, Lab directors, and Scientists interested in sharing validation tips, quality assurance, and extracting meaningful insights from the TSO500 NGS panel. This is an organic, collaborative group of members helping each other in clinical NGS with our collective vision of democratization of NGS testing.
Over the past eight years, the SEQUOIA Team is grown and is now composed of over 100+ professionals involved in the validation and interpretation of genetic variants, including molecular pathologists and scientists from over 40+ worldwide academic institutions, companies, and NIH laboratories.
History
The SEQUOIA Team was founded in 2017 at the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) meeting during an informal gathering of individuals from five academic institutions that were dealing with challenges related to validation of NGS with the Illumina TST170 platform: Ravindra Kolhe, MD, PhD (Augusta University/Medical College of Georgia), Theresa Boyle, MD, PhD (Moffitt Cancer Center), Dahui Qin, MD, PhD (Moffitt Cancer Center), Dan Farkas, PhD (Cleveland Clinic), Jay Brock, PhD (Cleveland Clinic), Francine Blumental De Abreu, PhD (Dartmouth), and Qi Wei, PhD (Miami Cancer Institute).
Goals
The goal of the SEQUOIA Team is to openly share knowledge, understanding, questions, and perplexities about NGS validation, bioinformatics processing, and interpretation as end users. SEQUOIA aims to establish a community for joint validation of complex biomarkers, such as tumor mutation burden (TMB) microsatellite instability (MSI), RNA seq, and now HRD, and to perform collaborative quality assurance through collaborations for sharing of samples and data for validation and proficiency testing.
Learn more:
Communication
We have an active listserv, monthly virtual meetings, and annual meetings at AMP. If interested, we would be happy to include new users to strengthen our discussions. Please reach out to us directly to join the monthly Zoom meeting at 2pm EST on the last Friday.
Thank you,
Ravi Kolhe
Terry Boyle