Here’s How Leading Healthcare and Genomics Research Organizations Scaled up Their Research and Reduced Costs by Almost 60%

DNA sequencing of a single human genome can potentially produce several hundred gigabytes of data, which includes billions of DNA fragments. With rapidly increasing data, how to arrive at optimized, faster, and less expensive experimenting and DNA sequencing? In this space, we bring to you stories from leading organizations in healthcare and genomics research, about how they scaled up their research with Google’s powerful storage and computational Cloud platform…

Data storage and compute power in the life sciences and bio-tech industry are critical to sustain growth and to enable quicker medical discoveries. Big genomic data is here today, with petabytes rapidly growing toward exabytes. Processing millions of genomes and handling massive all-by-all comparisons of genomic information across them, takes more compute power than even the best university or private clusters offer.

At LabAgility, we are often contacted by scientists, researchers, pathological groups, universities, and labs with one same question – How to accelerate quality research at overall reduced spend?

With this post, our goal is to practically ‘show’ through examples and stories than pouring down opinions and observations. Hence we have compiled some customer stories where we helped major organizations from life sciences and genomics data research communities, leverage the power of Google Genomics and Google Cloud platform to securely store, process, explore, organize, interpret, and share large, complex biological datasets, improve research, and run more experiments everyday.

Quick scan of the solution

Implemented high-throughput DNA sequencing data analysis pipeline using Google Cloud Platform to automate data processing at scale
Simplified real-time querying of whole genome sequencing and exome sequencing data using BigQuery
Shares data with customers anywhere in the world
Unlimited scalability

Bringing genomics data analysis to labs without bioinformatics resources

When bioinformatics expert and founder of YouGenomics Dr. Avinash Abhyankar looked at the genomics landscape, he noticed that labs and institutions were divided into haves and have-nots: those with computational and analytical experience to deal with enormous genomics datasets, and those that could produce but not interpret the “omics” data. YouGenomics with a vision to make these analytical capabilities available to hospitals and small research labs.

The company focuses on whole genome sequencing data as well as other data such as epigenetics and gene expression profiling data. “Our main goal is to make analysis of these kinds of high throughput studies available to everyone, not just a few big labs with big funding,” Dr. Abhyankar adds.

Dr. Abhyankar knew it didn’t make sense for each lab or research facility to build their own compute infrastructure to manage these projects since it would require too much maintenance and investment and wouldn’t scale as needed. YouGenomics chose to work with MediaAgility, and we chose Google Cloud Platform as the computational backbone for the company because it’s scalable, easy to use, highly secure, and accessible all over the world. Here’s more about how solution works for them:

MediaAgility, with Google Cloud Platform and Google Genomics, developed a platform for YouGenomics that automates the analysis of next-generation sequencing data and reduces the turnaround time as well as saves on heavy investments.

Today, YouGenomics is successfully helping clients with massive-scale genomics studies and is providing high-quality data processing and analysis services through their system built on Google Cloud Platform.

Highly scalable, efficient, and cost effective solution to run more experiments every day

In another customer success story, as a DNA sequencing company, customer is dedicated to simplifying genetic testing while making it affordable. The organization is focussed around developing a revolutionary, cost-effective DNA/RNA reader that can improve current understanding and diagnosis of cancer and infectious diseases, and other genetic diseases.

Earlier, researchers at customer’s organization analyzed raw data using proprietary software. Analysis of data required intensive computational efforts, which turned out to be extremely costly, and took considerable amount of time.

What did they need?

Researchers at customer’s organization wanted a solution that could provide them the ability to collaborate with peers and re-submit or re-analyze the experiments in a secure and compliant environment. They also wanted a secure web based solution that can provide them real-time status of experiments during their computational workflow.

Quick scan of the solution

Reduced compute and storage cost per experiment
Reduced time taken per experiment
Better visibility about the experiments
Enable researchers / scientists to effectively run their experiments and improve research.
Real time experiment status to the researchers for analyzing genetic data
In advance notification to reserve available instruments and laboratory systems
Unlimited scale to store data for future experiments, and receive daily, weekly and monthly stats about various experiments

Here’s how it happened…

Keeping in mind, customer’s requirements, MediaAgility developed a robust, Google cloud based genetic data analysis and discovery platform, with a dynamic and intuitive interface that organizes analytical data related to experiments in an easily accessible, organized manner with smart filters to monitor progress of experiment through various stages of analysis.

The solution delivers tens of thousands of compute scores, stores multiple terabytes of data, and facilitates peer collaboration globally in a secure and compliant environment. This not only increased the throughput, reduced the overall time taken in performing analysis but also substantially reduced the analysis cost per experiment by around 60%.

Expediting the research processes through instant collaboration and easy access

In another scenario, customer, a leading innovator and enabler of tissue-based cancer diagnostic solutions, wanted the platform to aid exchange of knowledge, ideas and innumerable cases triggering discussion to further evolve the dimension of healthcare research to improve cancer treatments, laboratory efficiency, and patient well-being.

What did they need?

Customer wanted to maximize the value of clinical research with easy collaboration to improve disease understanding and quality of life of cancer patients. To facilitate this, customer wanted to bring researchers, pathological groups, and other industry participants together on a common platform to collaborate on the scanned microslides – the tissue samples of cancer patients in digital format.

Quick scan of the solution

Highly scalable and easy to access by members anytime, anywhere
The biopsies are captured, scanned, and saved on the platform with highest image quality to be viewed by the clinicians, researchers, and medical students
The solution has enabled exchange of knowledge, ideas and innumerable cases, along with discussion and research

Here’s how it happened…

The solution has been a stepping stone for the customer to one of the holy grails in current healthcare scenario, that is, ‘Personalized Healthcare’. The platform has already transformed into one of the largest digital pathology community. It caters to the vast community of pathologists in the healthcare industry who access clinical data in digital format on web to investigate and annotate.

The availability of biopsies in microslides in a digitized form through ‘Image Viewer’, is path-breaking in the world of pathology. MediaAgility has helped the customer maximize the value of collaborative clinical research and help improve disease understanding.

The power of Google Genomics

Google Genomics allows you to tap into the leading infrastructure available through Cloud Platform. Take advantage of Compute Engine, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), to run large-scale workloads on virtual machines and pay only for what you use.

The cloud storage offers global edge-caching for fast access to data from any location and reliable versioning. You’ll also get sophisticated load balancing along with the performance and consistency of Google’s worldwide fiber network.

In addition, Google Genomics features a number of tools to make your life easier. The open-source tools and cloud compute power can enable you to make a qualitative change in their analyses, switching from more limited batch processing to interactive processing that lets you make changes on the fly and see the effects of those edits immediately.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/genomics/overview

Accelerate your genomic discoveries with LabAgility – a component based solution optimized to store, process and analyse NGS data. Built through a partnership between MediaAgility and Google Genomics, LabAgility offers you the best of cloud, big data analytics and machine learning, with no SaaS or platform lock-ins.

We, as a premier Google Cloud Premier Partner invite you to join our event – Google Cloud for Life Sciences on 9th June 2017, at 2 pm – 4 pm, at Google Quad Campus, QD7 Tech Talk room – Almaden Valley. Register here to book your seat.

Missed this meet-up? Check out other upcoming briefings here or contact us to set up an innovation workshop.

References:

Google Genomics

Genomics labs can reduce costs by up to 80%

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