MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DNAnexus, the global leader in genome informatics and data management, today announced that it has worked with Intel Corporation, the world’s largest semiconductor company, to deploy elPrep, a high-performance software tool for the preparation of genomic data for large-scale sequence analysis. The first use is by Janssen Research & Development, a division of Janssen Pharmaceutica, which is currently using elPrep in the settings of precision medicine research and clinical applications. It is the mission of Janssen R&D to discover and develop innovative medicines that ease patient’s suffering, and solve the most important unmet medical needs of our time.
elPrep, developed by Janssen R&D, IMEC and Intel as part of the ExaScience Life Lab, was designed for preparing SAM/BAM/CRAM files for variant calling in next-generation sequence analysis workflows. The ExaScience Life Lab is a collaboration between IMEC, Intel, and Janssen Pharmaceutica to explore the application of high-performance computing to problems in the life sciences industry. IMEC is a world-leading nanoelectronics research center headquartered in Leuven, Belgium.
“elPrep is completely compatible with existing tools and datasets, and can be used as a drop-in replacement for SAMtools and Picard to deliver a 6-10x performance enhancement,” according to Ketan Paranjape, General Manager Life Sciences at Intel Corporation. These results, shown with benchmarks executing elPrep on a 24-core server consisting of 12-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 processors, clocked at 2.6 GHz.
“The DNAnexus platform has been designed to host a variety of genome sequencing tools and applications for clinical research and advancing genomic medicine,” said Richard Daly, CEO of DNAnexus. “We are proud to partner with Intel to bring the elPrep tool to the global DNAnexus network.”
The ExaScience Life Lab has open-sourced elPrep on GitHub, and DNAnexus specific modifications are available in a public project on the DNAnexus platform.
About DNAnexus
DNAnexus combines expertise in cloud computing and bioinformatics to create the global network for genomic medicine. DNAnexus provides security, scalability and collaboration for enterprises and organizations that are pursuing genomic-based approaches to health in order to accelerate medical discovery. DNAnexus is supporting customers around the world that are tackling some of the most challenging and exciting opportunities in human health. For more information, please visit: https://dnanexus.com and follow us at @DNAnexus.
