Asian Scientist Journal (Aug. 19, 2022) — Blockbusters may nonetheless be headlining on the field workplace, however not in terms of healthcare. More and more, the life sciences business is shifting its pursuits from the event of mass-produced medication, aka blockbuster medication, in the direction of growing area of interest, high-value, customized 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 brought on by genes and environmental elements, 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 knowledge 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 latest whitepaper titled ‘Leveraging Excessive-Efficiency Compute Infrastructure to Tackle the Genomic Information Problem in Life Sciences’ that was commissioned by Lenovo & Intel, and led by IDC famous that 28% of Asian respondents chosen “answer shouldn’t be scalable” because the top-most motive to guage enhancing their current Excessive Efficiency Computing (HPC) infrastructure. “An excessive amount of customization required” (20%) and “[the] answer 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 Know-how and its Genomics Optimization and Scalability Instrument (GOAST) to deal with 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 rapidly 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 unintended effects. By means of its predictive capabilities, GOAST ensures that therapy is much less reactive – in order that healthcare suppliers ship true well being care, somewhat than sick care.
- What are some key challenges that scientists sometimes face in terms of 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 earnings, development, and delays time to scientific insights.
With the introduction of HPC applied sciences, comparable to Lenovo’s GOAST, the only human genome can now be processed in a record-breaking 48 minutes. That is 188 instances sooner than earlier than!
GOAST additionally accelerates genomics analytics and will increase pattern throughput at prices which might 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?
Undoubtedly. For instance, the Barcelona Supercomputing Heart (BSC), which operates and manages MareNostrum—one of the crucial highly effective supercomputers in Europe—is collaborating with us to boost the way in which it runs advanced multi-omics workflows.
BSC understands how vital it’s for them to offer highly effective computational sources to assist the top customers. However doing so has grow to be harder as the quantity of information produced annually has elevated. With GOAST, BSC was capable of velocity up vital multi-omics analysis for most cancers and different illnesses by lowering the time wanted to course of complete genome samples.
- What makes your staff 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 most effective engineers from HPC & AI staff led by Scott Tease, GM of HPC & AI, and business’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 all places 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 fundamental analysis, infectious illness, or precision drugs.
(Responses are edited for size and readability).
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Images: Lenovo.
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