WuXi NextCODE Announces Genomics Partnership with Google Cloud

March 7, 2018

By Bio-IT World Staff 

March 7, 2018 | WuXi NextCODE today announced a partnership with Google Cloud. WuXi NextCODE’s core suite of capabilities—including GORdb, WuXi NextCODE secondary analysis, the Sequence Miner case-control research application, and the Clinical Sequence Analyzer clinical interpretation system—will be hosted on Google Cloud and available on the Google Cloud Launcher marketplace.

At the same time, key Google genomics and research tools will be integrated and deployable in tandem with the WuXi NextCODE platform, beginning with the DeepVariant secondary analysis pipeline, alongside Google Cloud BigQuery and other open-source analysis pipelines and tools available through Google Cloud Platform.

The companies plan to launch the first phase of the offering at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston in May.

“At Bio-IT World we aim to announce the availability to users of the first phase of this partnership: an interoperable WuXi NextCODE and Google Cloud suite of capabilities for using genomics at scale, not only in the cloud but also with the ability to fully utilize big datasets at raw resolution over the internet,” said Edward Farmer, WuXi NextCODE’s Chief Communications Officer, in an email this morning. “That means at first pass our GOR database management system, and research and clinical interpretation applications, as well as Google Cloud's DeepVariant secondary analysis, BigQuery and other open-source tools, in whatever combination customers want to use them.”

The companies plan to work on additional tools, capabilities and APIs going forward, to serve the global genomics community for the benefit of people worldwide.

"WuXi NextCODE has been a pioneer of large-scale genomics, and we are thrilled to welcome them as a Google Cloud Partner,” said Jonathan Sheffi, Product Manager, Genomics & Life Sciences at Google in a press release. “Our collaboration aims to create a powerful interoperable suite of capabilities to derive insight from sequence data.”

“This partnership is an important step towards realizing our vision to provide people and organizations with the best tools for using genomic data, anywhere and at any scale,” said Hannes Smarason, CEO of WuXi NextCODE in the same statement. “We are excited to see our platform launch on Google Cloud this spring, and to explore collaborative projects that require the combined horsepower of our own and Google’s tools and teams. Together, I expect we will find innovative ways to make more data more useful to more people, advancing the genomics field as well as serving our customers.”