By Diagnostics World Staff
April 20, 2017 | Congenica and Edico Genome today announced the companies have partnered to offer their complementary platform technologies as an all-in-one, genome data analysis solution that accelerates clinical labs’ and hospitals’ progression from DNA sequencing to diagnosis for inherited diseases which otherwise takes months or years. This dramatic improvement in diagnosis can be achieved whilst also reducing costs.
Available immediately, the new offering combines Congenica’s Sapientia software platform, which allows hospitals and labs to analyse and interpret the genome and create comprehensive diagnostic reports to support clinical decision making, with Edico Genome’s DRAGEN, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-centric platform that implements genome pipeline algorithms to analyse a whole genome in only 20 minutes onsite, or under 10 minutes in a single cloud instance.
Edico’s DRAGEN has been used in numerous other partnerships, including one with the Broad Institute’s Genome Analysis Toolkit, as well as a development with Baylor Genetics last autumn.
Both platforms accelerate analysis times while maintaining high accuracy, significantly lowering costs and providing accessibility via the cloud.
Edico’s DRAGEN Bio-IT processor has been assessed as part of University College London’s (UCL) Rapid Paediatric Sequencing Project (RaPs), a pilot aimed at evaluating the use of rapid whole genome sequencing (WGS) for rare diseases in an intensive care clinical setting.
Phil Beales, Professor of Medical and Molecular Genetics at UCL, wrote in a statement: “For children with rare diseases and their parents, answers cannot come quickly enough. Faster answers mean less time finding a diagnosis and more time making decisions about treatment and care. After extensively testing and validating the platforms, we were impressed by the speed, accuracy and cost savings conferred. Initially, we will apply the technology to a number of clinical cases where rapid turnaround is especially critical, and ultimately envisage the solution will be widely used as we scale our efforts.”