Edico Genome has hooked up with Intel ($INTC) in an attempt to shave more minutes off the time it takes to analyze a whole genome. The partnership brings together Edico's NGS analysis hardware and the Intel Xeon microprocessors that reside in many servers used in genomics.
San Diego, CA-based Edico stands to benefit from the partnership in a couple of ways. Products that in some way marry the technology behind Edico's Dragen microprocessor--which in its current form slots into a PC like a video card--with Xeon are expected to come to market next year. The combination should allow Edico to cut the time it takes to analyze a genome--which it claims Dragen can do in 20 minutes--and put its nascent technology in front of all of Intel's Xeon clients.
 |
| Edico CEO Pieter van Rooyen |
The goal is to make real-time analysis of whole genomes possible. For Edico, the knock-on benefit of working with Intel is that more people will hear about Dragen and it will expand the range of ways in which they can access the technology. "It really allows our technology to be deployed in a very wide range of facilities," Edico CEO Pieter van Rooyen told U-T San Diego. "We can go all the way from doing the processing right on the sequencing machine all the way through to processing the genomic data in the cloud. It gives us a lot of scalability to our approach."
Intel has taken an interest in genomics in recent years, striking deals with Ayasdi and Genalice 12 months ago. Both those agreements related to the optimization of software to run on Intel's Xeon. The Edico partnership takes a hardware-based approach, for which Intel has high hopes. "Our call to the industry--both technical and medical community alike--is: Could we do precision medicine in a day by 2020?" Ketan Paranjape, general manager of life sciences at Intel, told Fortune. "The middle phase, the analysis, is what we're trying to cut down in partnership with Edico."
- read the release
- check out Fortune's piece
- here's U-T San Diego's take
- and Xconomy's coverage
Special Report: Top 10 Biotech IT Investments in the past year