Asian Scientist Journal (Aug. 19, 2022) — Blockbusters would possibly nonetheless be headlining on the field workplace, however not in relation to healthcare. More and more, the life sciences trade is shifting its pursuits from the event of mass-produced medicine, aka blockbuster medicine, in the direction of growing area of interest, high-value, personalised options for sufferers.
That is the place genomic sequencing—a complete laboratory methodology used to decipher the genetic materials present in an organism or virus—has change into essential. By serving to researchers perceive extra about ailments attributable to genes and environmental elements, genome sequencing can in flip result in earlier diagnoses, interventions, and even improve the probabilities of profitable remedy.
However right here’s the factor, the exponential progress within the quantity of genomic knowledge has offered a “sequencing paradox”. Whereas know-how has solved discovery and scientific challenges, know-how infrastructure itself has now change into a hindrance.
A latest whitepaper titled ‘Leveraging Excessive-Efficiency Compute Infrastructure to Handle the Genomic Knowledge Problem in Life Sciences’ that was commissioned by Lenovo & Intel, and led by IDC famous that 28% of Asian respondents chosen “resolution shouldn’t be scalable” because the top-most purpose to judge enhancing their current Excessive Efficiency Computing (HPC) infrastructure. “An excessive amount of customization required” (20%) and “[the] resolution may be very advanced” (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 Expertise and its Genomics Optimization and Scalability Device (GOAST) to handle among the key challenges that genomics efforts face.
- GOAST—cool title. 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 pace of research, whereas AI helps make sense of the variations between genomes.
The answer measures a person’s susceptibility to ailments, predicts their responses to particular remedy and eliminates pointless unwanted effects. By way of its predictive capabilities, GOAST ensures that remedy is much less reactive – in order that healthcare suppliers ship true well being care, relatively than sick care.
- What are some key challenges that scientists usually face in relation to deploying rising applied sciences for his or her genomics analysis?
Early efforts at sequencing genes had 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 earnings, progress, and delays time to scientific insights.
With the introduction of HPC applied sciences, resembling Lenovo’s GOAST, the one 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 data by making high-performance analytics inexpensive and accessible to institutes, thereby decreasing obstacles to innovation.
- Does GOAST profit different industries as effectively?
Positively. For instance, the Barcelona Supercomputing Middle (BSC), which operates and manages MareNostrum—one of the vital highly effective supercomputers in Europe—is collaborating with us to reinforce the way in which it runs advanced multi-omics workflows.
BSC understands how important it’s for them to offer highly effective computational assets to help the top customers. However doing so has change into tougher as the quantity of knowledge produced every year has elevated. With GOAST, BSC was capable of pace up important multi-omics analysis for most cancers and different ailments by lowering the time wanted to course of entire genome samples.
- What makes your workforce totally different?
Lenovo’s distinctive strategy to delivering world-class options to our prospects lies in our multidisciplinary experience, the place we’ve got 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 medication. The tech revolution of accessible innovation is right here—be it for fundamental analysis, infectious illness, or precision medication.
(Responses are edited for size and readability).
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Pictures: Lenovo.
This text doesn’t essentially replicate the views of AsianScientist or its employees.
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