The Dragen Bio-IT Processor from Edico Genome is designed to accelerate NGS data analysis while improving accuracy and maintaining flexibility over existing solutions. The current collaboration with Intel will pave the way for even faster, real-time NGS analysis.
The Dragen Bio-IT Processor from Edico Genome is designed to accelerate NGS data analysis while improving accuracy and maintaining flexibility over existing solutions. The current collaboration with Intel will pave the way for even faster, real-time NGS analysis.

San Diego based Edico Genome has announced today a collaboration with Intel Corporation to tackle the growing concerns surrounding next-generation sequencing (NGS) data analysis, utilizing Intel’s Xenon processors. Currently, it can take a minimum of 10 hours to analyze a complete genome using standard analysis software. The Edico-Intel collaboration should allow researchers to complete primary and secondary NGS analysis in real time.

“Edico Genome’s DRAGEN™, the world’s first Bio-IT processor, is currently helping clinicians and researchers overcome a key bottleneck in NGS workflow by rapidly analyzing big data, and we look forward to working with Intel to offer a powerful genomics analysis solution,” said Pieter van Rooyen, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Edico Genome. “In addition, this partnership accelerates deployment of DRAGEN to Intel’s customer base around the world, greatly expanding the reach and adoption of our bioinformatics processor.”

The partnership between Edico and Intel is focused on expediting NGS data analysis in order to meet the demands of clinical genomics and precision medicine, which has been an ongoing focus for Intel. Last year, Intel and the Broad Institute partnered to optimize the frequently used genomics analysis pipeline, Broad's Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK), for Intel Xeon-powered servers, and together they were able to reduce the time it takes to analyze a whole human genome from three days down to one day. Now, Edico and Intel technologies are able to analyze a whole genome 70 times faster and complete the analysis in 20 minutes.

“Across industries, the demands of big data are pushing the limits of general purpose processing, creating an opportunity for optimized solutions that are able to keep up with specific data processing demands,” explained Ketan Paranjape, general manager of life sciences at Intel . “As the use of NGS grows, many of our customers, including hospitals and research institutions, have a need for solutions that can process and analyze these huge data sets rapidly and cost effectively. Edico Genome’s significant domain expertise in the arena of genomics analysis makes them an ideal partner in this vertical space.”

This is a much needed collaboration as it addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks currently facing the field of genomics. The solutions generated from this collaboration should provide superior accuracy, decrease overall NGS costs, streamline data analysis in the cloud, and assist applications that require sharing of big data sets, such as analysis of population-scale genomic data.

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