The Sequencing and Oncological Informatics Academic (SEQUOIA) Team is a collaborative, academic, and non-commercial clinical NGS user group established in 2017. Comprised of molecular pathologists, laboratory directors, and scientists, SEQUOIA focuses on sharing best practices in validation, quality assurance, and interpretation of data from the TSO500 NGS panel. United by a shared vision to democratize access to NGS testing, the group fosters organic, peer-to-peer support to advance clinical genomics.
Over the past eight years, SEQUOIA has grown into a global consortium of over 100 professionals from more than 40 academic institutions, companies, and NIH laboratories. Members contribute expertise in variant validation, data interpretation, and the development of translational genomic workflows.
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).
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:
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