Industry News: Google Cloud and IntegraGen to Offer Large-Scale Genomic Analysis Tools for Clinicians and Medical Researchers

IntegraGen, a company specializing in the decoding of the human genome with a focus on producing interpretable genomic analysis for academic and private laboratories, today announced it will be collaborating with Google Cloud for the implementation of IntegraGen’s advanced genomic analysis tools, SIRIUS™ and MERCURY™ into the Google Cloud Platform. This partnership will enable widespread online availability, rapid data transfer and enhanced data security to clinicians and researchers utilizing these analytical tools.

“Working with Google Cloud will enable us to provide our customers with integrated and powerful options for rapidly analyzing large-scale genomic data online through our SIRIUS and MERCURY analysis tools”, stated Bérengère Génin, IntegraGen’s Director of Bioinformatics. “As was presented during the Paris Google Cloud Summit this past June, the availability of our genomic data analysis tools via the cloud now makes personalized medicine a reality.”

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Presentation of MERCURY during the Google Cloud Summit 2018

This collaboration between the Google Cloud and IntegraGen will facilitate important genomics research projects and aid in the analysis of sequencing data, enhancing the adoption of personalized approaches to medical care. Contributing to making these new approaches widely available to clinicians and researchers worldwide is not only a significant business opportunity but also a major advance for providing access to care.

The collaboration included technical support from Google Cloud and its partner SFEIR for the on-boarding of SIRIUS and MERCURY into the Google Cloud Platform. Users of the tools can now run genomic interpretation projects in parallel, faster than ever before. Going forward, IntegraGen continues to add additional features to both tools while exploring the capabilities of Google Cloud’s range of big data and innovative Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. Both companies continue to work in close cooperation to conform to the strictest data privacy and security standards in Europe and comply with HIPAA regulations in the United States.

“Being supported by the Google Cloud Platform for facilitating the online interpretation of genomic data enhances the value of the tools we have developed”, said Bernard Courtieu, CEO of IntegraGen, “Importantly, it also enables our state-of-the-art tools, MERCURY and SIRIUS, to be widely available to clinicians and researchers around the world and for our customers to benefit from the advantages associated with Google Cloud, whose platform is considered as one of the world’s most advanced one.”

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MERCURY is a biological interpretation tool for oncology designed to help pathologists and oncologists transform raw data obtained via high-throughput sequencing into a clinical molecular report for diagnostic and clinical use. MERCURY minimizes the complexity, time, and costs associated with the clinical interpretation and identification of variants that may be of interest in the therapeutic management of patients.

SIRIUS assists researchers to quickly and intuitively analyze sequencing data from individuals from one or more families to identify genes or variants of interest by testing all transmission hypotheses, even if complex. SIRIUS provides researchers with ease of use and speed of analysis despite considerable volumes of data being analyzed.

The solution that has been jointly developed uses a full suite of Google Cloud Platform tools including:

• Google Kubernetes Engine providing a high-performing, flexible infrastructure, allowing the connection with external apps with higher availability, and elastic infrastructure, permitting to run jobs in parallel like and dramatically reducing cycle time.
• Google Compute Engine VMs and Google Cloud Storage provide High Performance Computing clusters, enhanced by using local SSDs attached to the nodes allowing a significant performance improvement for the specific tasks that require deal with massive temporary files.
• Google BigQuery, the serverless, highly scalable, enterprise data warehouse.

“We would never have achieved such level of performance with our on-premise infrastructure”, said Bérengère Génin, IntegraGen’s Director of Bioinformatics. “Built-in machine learning technology from Google Cloud encouraged us to move a step ahead to build our own custom models.”