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32 Clinical OMICs July/August 2017 www.clinicalomics.com Data & Informatics More than a year after announcing its intention to sequencing the genomes of two million patients, AstraZeneca's (AZ) Centre for Genomic Research (CGR) has tapped genomic data and informatics company DNAnexus to leverage its cloud-based platform for the management of these vast data- sets that the company intends to apply across its entire research and develop- ment pipeline. "The scale of data has increased rapidly and the tools that are required have increased in complexity over the past few years," said Richard Daly, CEO of DNAnexus. "But more impor- tantly, the value of genomic data that everyone is focusing on now is the ability to create much more complex datasets that relate genomic data with phenotypic data." The AZ genomic initiative will rely on extensive clinical data that will include up to 500 specific measure- ments per each patient that has par- ticipated in a clinical trial with the company. According to Ruth March, VP of personalized healthcare and biomarkers with AZ, the DNAnexus platform will allow the company to "continue progressing towards our ambitious goal of analyzing two million genomes to help us better understand the underlying causes of disease." According DNAnexus, the collabo- ration with AZ is via an open-ended agreement, and will allow the CGR to manage and analyze the mas- sive amounts of data it will generate via the sequencing of thousands of patient samples per week. These data will then be available to AZ and its researcher collaborators globally via DNAnexus's cloud platform. In Daly's view, the scale and scope of a project like AZ's can only be man- aged via the cloud. "With the rise in value of genomic data, and the need to process really large datasets that once you get above a few hundred whole genomes, into the thousands and now into the millions, you can no longer do that on a local computer cluster. Some of the work our customers are running on our platform are using 50,000 cores, when even the largest genomic com- puter centers only have 8,000 cores." To give a point of reference of the explosive increasing in data velocity, Daly cites an agreement the company entered less than four years ago with the Human Genome Sequencing Cen- ter (HGSC) at Baylor College of Med- icine to analyze the sequencing data of 14,000 patients—a project that was referred to at the time as "large-scale." "When we announced that collab- oration, it was considered a break- through and it was based on 15,000 samples," he noted. Now, with the numbers moving into the millions, past work with leading research centers and the FDA under its belt, DNAnexus is out to prove that the ability to securely scale is at the heart of providing its service. "Four years ago, when we ran the 15,000, we did not have the same architecture underlying what we do now," Daly concluded. "With the global network and architecture (we deploy), whether it is 1 million, or 10 million, scale is not a factor."—Chris Anderson identifying potential therapies. Watson for Genomics processed both abstracts and full text articles from Pub- Med, and using this information, the NYGC and Watson collaborated to identify gene alterations of therapeutic significance. Genomics England Adopts Illumina's BaseSpace Variant Interpreter for Cancer Genomics England has named Illumina as the primary variant interpretation and reporting software vendor for tumor and matched normal samples to be charac- terized as part of the 100,000 Genomes Project. In the coming months, Genomics En- gland will be expanding the use of Base- Space Variant Interpreter for cancer to all NHS Genomic Medicine Centers, and Illumina will be removing the Beta status from its software offering, with a planned formal launch or public release later this summer. "We are very pleased to be enabling cutting-edge variant interpretation and precision genomics for the NHS in cancer," said Garret Hampton, Ph.D., EVP clinical genomics group at Illumina. "This is a ma- jor milestone for our population sequenc- ing efforts, and demonstrates Illumina's commitment to developing software that delivers on the promise of transformative healthcare through sequencing." Sir John Chisholm, executive chair at Genomics England, said: "We believe that (continued from previous page) Gio_tto / Getty Images (continued on next page) AZ Partners with DNAnexus for 2 Million Patient Sequencing Project