In a previous post, our new CMO, David Shaywitz, talked about his vision for DNAnexus and its role in helping fulfill the promise of genomic medicine:
“DNAnexus represents a natural home for these aspirations, offering a compelling, secure, cloud-based data management platform, an enabling tool for any healthcare organization – academic medical center, healthcare system, biopharma company, payor – who recognizes that getting a handle on large healthcare data flows is rapidly becoming table stakes, and that figuring out how to manage and leverage genomic data is a wise place to start.”
Fast-forward two months… This week, we announced exciting progress in our efforts to accelerate genomic medicine. The DNAnexus cloud-based genome informatics and data management platform is powering a number of collaborations between Regeneron Genetics Center (RGC) and its leading healthcare provider partners.
In a RGC press release, they announced these new collaborators, which include the Geisinger Health System, Columbia University Medical Center, Clinic for Special Children, and Baylor College of Medicine. The RGC will be using the DNAnexus platform to integrate sequencing data with de-identified clinical records from patient volunteers. To date, the RGC has sequenced samples from more than 10,000 individuals and is currently sequencing more than 50,000 samples per year.
The Geisinger collaboration, which has been described as the largest clinical sequencing project in the U.S., is on track to sequence more than 100,000 patient volunteer samples. This DNAnexus-powered initiative has resulted in the first 100% cloud-based biopharma genome center, and is now operating at scale.
Next-generation sequencing technologies, like Illumina’s HiSeq 2500 or X Ten platform, have reduced the cost and increased the speed of DNA sequencing outpacing Moore’s Law to the point where the new bottleneck is genome informatics. To address this issue, companies like Regeneron are adopting cloud-based solutions to handle the massive volume of sequencing data.
DNAnexus provides the technology backbone that enables the sharing and management of data and tools around large volumes of sequencing data between the RGC and its healthcare collaborators. Currently the RGC is processing more than 1,000 exomes per week and sharing the data easily and safely with their collaborators.
In order to improve patient care and ultimately human health, the integration of genomic and phenotypic data needs to happen on a massive scale (something David has recently discussed from the perspective of phenotype here and here). Combining large cohorts of deeply-phenotyped individuals with their genomic data offers a wide range of medical applications, the most obvious being a more personalized approach to medical interventions such as which therapy might work best for a given individual. These data can also be used to aid in the development of new companion diagnostics and clinical trial participant selection. As an article in GigaOM put it this week: Cloud Computing is Coming for Your DNA, and it Will Lead to Better Drugs and Health Care.
These collaborations are powerful examples of how the DNAnexus platform is enabling an integrated approach between biopharmaceutical companies and their partners to accelerate the research and discovery process. As David said, healthcare industry leaders who prioritize the management of large healthcare data flows will emerge as the pioneers who help us realize the full vision of precision medicine –delivery of the optimal therapy to the right patients at the right time – ideally before they are sick.