Asian Scientist Journal (Aug. 19, 2022) — Blockbusters would possibly nonetheless be headlining on the field workplace, however not relating to healthcare. More and more, the life sciences trade is shifting its pursuits from the event of mass-produced medication, aka blockbuster medication, in the direction of growing area of interest, high-value, personalised options for sufferers.
That is the place genomic sequencing—a complete laboratory technique used to decipher the genetic materials present in an organism or virus—has grow to be essential. By serving to researchers perceive extra about illnesses attributable to genes and environmental components, genome sequencing can in flip result in earlier diagnoses, interventions, and even enhance the possibilities of profitable therapy.
However right here’s the factor, the exponential development within the quantity of genomic information has offered a “sequencing paradox”. Whereas know-how has solved discovery and scientific challenges, know-how infrastructure itself has now grow to be a hindrance.
A current whitepaper titled ‘Leveraging Excessive-Efficiency Compute Infrastructure to Handle the Genomic Information Problem in Life Sciences’ that was commissioned by Lenovo & Intel, and led by IDC famous that 28% of Asian respondents chosen “resolution will not be scalable” because the top-most motive to judge enhancing their present Excessive Efficiency Computing (HPC) infrastructure. “An excessive amount of customization required” (20%) and “[the] resolution could be very complicated” (24%) rank second and third respectively.
Right here’s the place HPC and Synthetic Intelligence (AI) come to the rescue. Sinisa Nikolic, Asia Pacific Director, HPC and AI, Lenovo ISG, tells us how Lenovo leverages Smarter Know-how and its Genomics Optimization and Scalability Software (GOAST) to deal with a few of the key challenges that genomics efforts face.
GOAST—cool identify. What’s all of it about?
GOAST makes use of HPC and AI to assist researchers shortly map the genomes of a cohort of individuals as a substitute of spending time analyzing a single genome. HPC helps high-throughput volumes to speed up the velocity of study, whereas AI helps make sense of the variations between genomes.
The answer measures a person’s susceptibility to illnesses, predicts their responses to particular therapy and eliminates pointless negative effects. By way of its predictive capabilities, GOAST ensures that therapy is much less reactive – in order that healthcare suppliers ship true well being care, slightly than sick care.
What are some key challenges that scientists usually face relating to deploying rising applied sciences for his or her genomics analysis?
Early efforts at sequencing genes have been painstaking, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. It used to take between 60 to 150 hours to course of a single human genome. This extreme time taken impacts income, development, and delays time to scientific insights.
With the introduction of HPC applied sciences, equivalent to Lenovo’s GOAST, the only human genome can now be processed in a record-breaking 48 minutes. That is 188 instances quicker than earlier than!
GOAST additionally accelerates genomics analytics and will increase pattern throughput at prices which can be one-third decrease than options counting on costly accelerators and proprietary software program. This democratizes information by making high-performance analytics reasonably priced and accessible to institutes, thereby reducing limitations to innovation.
Does GOAST profit different industries as properly?
Undoubtedly. For instance, the Barcelona Supercomputing Middle (BSC), which operates and manages MareNostrum—one of the highly effective supercomputers in Europe—is collaborating with us to boost the way in which it runs complicated multi-omics workflows.
BSC understands how crucial it’s for them to offer highly effective computational assets to assist the top customers. However doing so has grow to be tougher as the quantity of information produced annually has elevated. With GOAST, BSC was in a position to velocity up crucial multi-omics analysis for most cancers and different illnesses by decreasing the time wanted to course of complete genome samples.
What makes your workforce totally different?
Lenovo’s distinctive method to delivering world-class options to our clients lies in our multidisciplinary experience, the place we now have the perfect engineers from HPC & AI workforce led by Scott Tease, GM of HPC & AI, and trade’s finest scientists within the life sciences group, working in collaboration to ship highly effective options to speed up live-saving discoveries.
By rising high-throughput analytics, GOAST is empowering researchers in every single place to lower time to biomedical insights and forge the trail to precision drugs. The tech revolution of accessible innovation is right here—be it for primary analysis, infectious illness, or precision drugs.
(Responses are edited for size and readability).
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Images: Lenovo.
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