Genomic Medicine Training, New Storage Options, Food Allergy Science

July 12, 2016

July 12, 2016 | News and product launches from around the Bio-IT landscape include a postdoctoral fellowship in genomics medicine in Alabama, a synthetic biology partnership, new Lustre storage, and the Broad's food allergy science institute. 

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Genomic Medicine

HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been awarded a National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award to train postdoctoral fellows who have earned an MD and/or a PhD. The UAB-HudsonAlpha Genomic Medicine Research Training Program is designed to recruit trainees from various disciplines and provide mentorship and clinical research training in genomic medicine. At HudsonAlpha, the program will provide up to two years of support for postdoctoral trainees who choose to learn and work at the Institute. The NIH grant – known as a T32 grant – is the first of its kind to be awarded to a program that emphasizes both research and medical training in genomic medicine. Press release.

Synthetic Biology Partnership

Ginkgo Bioworks and Amyris, Inc. have announced a new partnership, which will enable the companies to jointly develop products more efficiently and cost effectively, accelerating time to market. As part of the deal, Ginkgo Bioworks will broaden the capacity of Amyris’s strain engineering by providing access to its world-class foundry, which the company opened in March 2015. Amyris will provide Ginkgo Bioworks scale up expertise and access to the world’s only commercial scale multi-product fermentation facility that has manufactured more cultured ingredients than any other known entity. Together, the two companies will have more than 70 products under contract for delivery to the world’s leading brands across industrial, health and personal care markets. Over the next three years, the two companies expect to move at least 20 additional products through to manufacturing and delivery to customers, and generate over $300 million in incremental value for both companies over the next 5 years. Press release.

Updated Structural Variation Analysis Tools

BioNano Genomics has updated its Irys Data Solutions to improve Structural Variation (SV) analysis in human samples. The Irys Data Solutions is a powerful suite of software and hardware solutions: IrysSolve hosts the data analysis pipeline; IrysView visualizes genome map information; and IrysSolve Compute is a server solution optimized to run the IrysSolve software. In this new version, IrysSolve v2.1 includes a new automated haplotype-aware assembler that separates allelic differences in the generated maps; and a new SV calling algorithm able to quickly and accurately determine individual instances of both homozygous and heterozygous structural variation within a human sample, whether through de novo or reference genome mapping. BioNano recently published a de novo genome assembly using 10x Genomics’ sequencing in Nature Methods. Press release.

Jensen Named COO of Blueprint Bio

Blueprint Bio has named Edward Jensen Chief Operating Officer, responsible for all strategic operations and execution. Jensen has over 30 years' successful leadership and managerial experience driving innovation, development and commercialization. Prior to joining Blueprint, Edward held a number of senior leadership positions at major pharmaceutical companies including Johnson & Johnson, Biogen, AstraZeneca and the TransCelerate industry collaboration. Press release.

Langer Joins Kalytera SAB

Kalytera Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company developing a portfolio of proprietary cannabinoid and endocannabinoid-like medicines, today announced the appointment of Dr. Robert S. Langer to its Scientific Advisory Board. Langer is a David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Transdermal delivery of cannabidiol, and other proprietary cannabinoids, may confer a variety of benefits to patients,” said Langer in a company press release. “I look forward to working with Kalytera’s leadership to evaluate and optimally advance the company’s portfolio of drug candidates for bone health.” Press release.

Broad et al. Launches Food Allergy Science Institute

Researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, its partner institutions, and Yale School of Medicine are launching an initiative to tackle the science of food allergies. The Food Allergy Science Initiative (FASI), which will be centered at the Broad, will tap the combined resources of participating academic and research institutions to help answer key scientific questions surrounding food allergies, the causes of which remain little-understood. Among the cutting-edge technologies the Broad will bring to bear on food allergy research are single-cell genomic analysis—which will reveal new information about the cell populations involved in the allergic response—and CRISPR genome-editing techniques, which will enable large-scale screens to test the role individual genes play in food allergy. The newly-founded initiative currently involve researchers from Yale School of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School (HMS), Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and MIT, in addition to the Broad. Along with Medzhitov and Regev, FASI’s scientific leadership includes Vijay Kuchroo (Broad, HMS, BWH); J. Christopher Love (Broad, MIT); Wayne Shreffler (MGH, HMS); and Ramnik Xavier (Broad, MGH, MIT, HMS). Food Allergy Science Institute

New York Discovery Institute Expands to Antibody Drug Discovery

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University and Weill Cornell Medicine will expand the focus of the successful Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute, Inc. (Tri-I TDI), a partnership established in 2013 to expedite early-stage drug discovery of innovative new therapies. Under this expansion, Tri-I TDI will extend its current relationship with its industry partner, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd. from the realm of small molecule discovery into the new research area of antibody drug discovery. Press release.

New Lustre Storage Appliance

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has unveiled its new high-end Lustre storage appliance, built specifically for HPC and data intensive Enterprise markets. The DDN EXAScaler ES14K, combines the industry’s fastest storage platform from DDN with Intel Enterprise Edition Lustre parallel file system to deliver the world’s most advanced Lustre appliance. Benefits of the new ES14K include:

  • Highest Performance – 4x faster than all other Lustre solutions on the market, providing up to ½ TB/second throughput in a single rack;
  • Lowest Latency – Delivers latencies as low as 100μs for superfast embedded file system and metadata speeds thanks to its specially designed internal PCIe Gen3 fabric;
  • Most Efficient Scalability – Provides up to 2x more capacity per rack than competitive alternatives, delivering 7+PB in a single rack and scaling to 14+PB in a single appliance;
  • Designed for Flash – All SSD configurations to deliver industry-leading storage IOPS, throughput and metadata performance. Leverage hybrid options to drive down the cost/GB while maintaining the performance of a flash tier;
  • Most Experienced Lustre Provider on the Globe – DDN brings over 10 years of Lustre development, deployment, optimization and support expertise to deliver high reliability, ease of deployment and optimal solution performance to the most demanding scale and performance environments around the world;
  • Exascale Ready – HPC architectures are now depending on the innovation leadership of DDN, which combines DDN’s Exascale-ready ES14K and DDN’s IME application acceleration and burst buffer, to deliver the world’s only complete solution for performance-optimized cache and cost-optimized storage that aligns with Exascale initiatives and budget.

Leveraging Lustre 2.7 pre-installed and fully optimized for DDN’s high-density storage appliances, ES14K delivers 4x the performance and up to 2x higher density than competitive offerings and offers robust management and monitoring interfaces, HPC-level performance that optimizes both mixed and parallel IO performance, and complete DDN/Intel integrated support.  Press release.