Intel teams with Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to analyze genomic data
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will join with Intel Corporation in a $25 million collaboration to help researchers analyze massive amounts of global genetic data, the organizations announced today.
Intel-Broad Center for Genomic Data Engineering's software engineers and researchers will build and share tools and infrastructure to process and integrate data, according to officials.
The goal of the 5-year partnership is to improve best practices in genome analytics, which will enable researchers to share and use mass data sets on private, public and hybrid clouds. Officials said the project will help researchers better perform data studies and genome analytics through new data sets.
"The size of genomic datasets doubles about every eight months and, as it does, the challenge of acquiring, processing, storing and analyzing this information increases as well," Eric Banks, director the Broad Institute's Data Sciences and Data Engineering group, said in a statement.
"Working with Intel, we plan to build out solutions that can work across different infrastructures to facilitate efficient processing of these growing data sets and then make these tools openly available for researchers worldwide," he added.
The project will combine Intel's analytics and artificial intelligence with Broad's extensive genomic data, health research and analysis tools to create new resources for biomedical studies like precision medicine.
The research team will focus on simplifying and improving genome analytics; utilizing Broad's Genome Analytics Toolkit to create recommendations for genomics; and encouraging collaboration between healthcare providers, researchers and pharmaceutical companies on workflow models and datasets.
"Our work is a step toward building something analogous to a superhighway to connect disparate databases of genomic information for the advancement of research and precision medicine," Banks said.
"Intel and Broad share the common vision of harnessing the power of genomic data and making it widely accessible for research around the world to yield important discoveries," Diane Bryant, Intel Data Center Group's executive vice president and general manager, said in a statement. "At Intel, through the use of artificial intelligence, we're confident we can solve the massive data challenges facing the industry."
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