Edico Genome Announces Contracts With NHGRI, NCI

By Bio-IT World Staff

August 2, 2017 | Edico Genome today announced it has signed contracts with the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for the use of its DRAGEN (Dynamic Read Analysis for Genomics) Bio-IT platform.

NHGRI and NCI purchased Edico Genome’s DRAGEN Somatic pipeline and DRAGEN Genome pipeline. The NHGRI signed a four-year contract with Edico Genome. The NCI purchased DRAGEN to provide operational and technical support for the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

“As an industry, we must each take an active role in forwarding this important work to put an end to cancer,” said Pieter van Rooyen, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Edico Genome, in a press release. “We designed DRAGEN to enable institutes such as the NHGRI and NCI to stay ahead of the big data bottleneck and expedite their timeframes for bringing vital research to light. With DRAGEN’s industry leading speed and high accuracy, labs can focus their time and money on what matters most – bringing personalized medicine into the mainstream.”

DRAGEN’s Somatic Pipeline is comprised of Edico Genome’s advanced Mapper/Aligner combined with its Tumor and Tumor/Normal Variant Caller algorithms. The Somatic Pipeline is designed to detect smaller allele frequencies and distinguish between tumor frequencies and noise variations, enabling accurate analysis and variant detection.

Edico Genome’s DRAGEN platform is built on a reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), enabling massively accelerated secondary analysis of genomic data. By implementing algorithms as logic circuits which can be massively parallelized, DRAGEN is able to deliver best-in-class performance, reducing the time needed to sequence a whole genome at 30x coverage from 20 to 30 hours using traditional technologies, such as BWA-GATK, to approximately 20 minutes.

DRAGEN is available onsite, in the cloud via Amazon Web Services (AWS) or as a hybrid cloud solution. To date, DRAGEN customers have processed more than 17 petabytes of data using the platform.