Medical Center Collaborates with GenomeQuest

GenomeQuest, Inc. (Westborough, MA, USA) a leader in sequence data management, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC; Boston, MA, USA), a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, are entering into a two-year collaboration to develop whole-genome analysis (WGA) applications for personalized health care. The announcement was made during the opening session of the World Health Forum, held at Harvard Medical School, on December 20, 2012, in Boston (MA, USA).

GenomeQuest will provide whole-genome data management and analysis capabilities for all next-generation sequencing projects in BIDMC’s dept. of pathology. GenomeQuest will also provide application programming interface (API) access and training to the department’s scientific investigators and applied mathematicians. BIDMC pathologists will develop clinical grade annotation methods and databases for diagnoses of cancers and other diseases. Collaborative projects will span user interface, workflows, sequence, and annotation management, and integration into health care Information Technology (IT) systems.

“The latest PriceWaterHouseCoopers report on personalized medicine estimates that this market will grow to nearly $500 billion in 2015 and terms it a ‘disruptive innovation’ for life sciences,” explained BIDMC chief of pathology Jeffrey Saffitz, MD, PhD. “The BIDMC pathology department is already a national leader in the development and application of genomics for personalized medicine, having launched its Genomic Medicine Training Initiative one year ago, and, this past spring, issuing a ‘Call to Action’ for pathology training programs across North America to do the same. Our collaboration with GenomeQuest helps provide us with the infrastructure to continue this work.”

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is clinically affiliated with the Joslin Diabetes Center and is a research partner of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. The core technology of GenomeQuest is the GQ-Engine–a sequence database engine that is purpose-built for storing, managing, and analyzing sequence data at whole- and multigenome scale.

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GenomeQuest, Inc.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center