New Data and Deployments from Edico Genome

By Bio-IT World Staff

October 21, 2014 | Edico Genome, a San Diego-based company manufacturing application-specific integrated circuits for processing genomic data, this week announced the broad commercial launch of its flagship DRAGEN processor. The DRAGEN is a chip that users can integrate into their servers or sequencing instruments, providing compute hardware specifically to map sequencing reads to a reference genome. Its aim is to piece short reads together into a complete genome, much faster than can be accomplished using a general-purpose server, relieving one of the most time-intensive steps in working with genomic data.

Edico made its first sale this September, to prenatal testing company Sequenom, following positive results in its early access program. (See "Edico Genome Makes First Sale of NGS Processor.") At the time, neither party was ready to reveal data surrounding the DRAGEN chip's performance. However, Sequenom has now presented a poster at the American Society for Human Genetics conference in San Diego, sharing the results of a test run of the DRAGEN processor on blood samples from over a thousand pregnant donors. Twenty million short reads generated on a HiSeq 2000 sequencer were mapped to reference using both the DRAGEN and a standard pipeline that included Bowtie 2 as the mapping algorithm, as part of Sequenom's workflow to identify fetal chromosomal disorders from maternal blood samples. Sequenom reported that the DRAGEN processor mapped the entire set of reads in nine seconds, roughly thirty times faster than the standard pipeline, with no significant difference in sensitivity or specificity in detecting fetal aneuploidies.

Edico has also announced that a DRAGEN processor is now deployed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which serves university and non-profit labs across the city.