HudsonAlpha, Dell EMC, St. Jude, And More: News From August 2018
August 29, 2018 | August featured exciting new, products, and partnerships from around the bio-IT community from innovating companies, organizations, and universities, including HudsonAlpha, Dell EMC, St. Jude, and more.
David Bick, clinical geneticist and a faculty investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, has been selected by Governor Kay Ivey to serve on the newly-created Alabama Rare Disease Council. The council held its inaugural meeting August 27, 2018 in Birmingham. Bick, who also sees rare disease patients at the Smith Family Clinic for Genomic Medicine, brings to the council more than two decades of clinical experience, as well as expertise in the rapidly-expanding field of genomic medicine. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers on genetics and genomics. “Rare disease isn’t rare. We estimate one in ten Americans has a rare disease, which translates to about 400,000 people in Alabama,” Bick said in a press release. “The Council will collect data on rare disease and help foster collaborations between stakeholder organizations across the states. Through research and by partnering with medical providers, patient advocacy groups, biotech companies and funding agencies, we can positively impact patients and families with rare disease in Alabama.” The Council is headquartered at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Medicine. Bruce Korf, chief genomics officer at UAB, serves as chair. Press release
The Garvan Institute of Medical Research has selected Dell EMC to deliver a high-performance computing (HPC) system for Garvan’s Data Intensive Computer Engineering (DICE) group, designed to push scientific boundaries and transform the way genomic research is currently performed in Australia. Garvan’s genomic research focuses on understanding how variations in each of our DNA sequences contributes to health and disease. Through genome sequencing and analysis of people, with and without a range of conditions, Garvan’s research is helping to drive precision medicine. This enables the delivery of the right medicine to the right person at the right time, helps to assess predisposition for a disease, and predicts adverse reactions to certain drugs. Garvan has already seen significant success in identifying the DNA changes that underpin cancer and immune, cardiac, mitochondrial and other diseases. To store, analyze, and use this genomic information effectively, Garvan requires large computational resources and data storage. Each person’s genomic data contains over six billion bases and around five million genetic variants, taking up to 700 hours to process. The Dell EMC HPC infrastructure, built on 14th generation PowerEdge technologies, with NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing and Intel Xeon Scalable Processoand FPGA, enables researchers to leverage best-of-breed architecture that can handle scientific workloads and push the boundaries of what’s possible. The new infrastructure will expand on Garvan’s existing on-premise system–not only supporting traditional computational analysis and simulation but offering extensive big data analytics and deep learning capabilities. Press release
Certara announced the launch of D360 v10.5, the first in a series of releases focused on delivering biologic-relevant tools together with D360’s world-class data access capabilities. This latest release of Certara’s D360 self-service data informatics platform upgrades the efficiency and consistency of data-driven biologics research workflows for drug discovery scientists, adds a new multi-parameter scoring capability, and improves data analysis and visualization across all modalities. With the advent of recombinant DNA technology and biomanufacturing, therapeutic discovery projects increasingly center on biologic modalities, especially oligonucleotides. The worldwide biologic drugs market is estimated to be valued at more than $200 billion, growing at a rate of 10% per year. While informatics systems for capturing biologics data are maturing, scientists often lack the tools required to understand and prioritize these entities efficiently, relying on manually-curated spreadsheets for crucial decision making. “While many of our customers use D360 for biologics and small molecule research already, this latest release delivers discovery tools that significantly strengthen the platform’s oligonucleotide capabilities and workflows. We have also incorporated feedback from thousands of D360 users to fine-tune workflows and usability across modality types, allowing scientists to focus on the data and science instead of the software they are using,” said David Lowis, senior director of D360 at Certara, in an official statement. Press release
Certara also reported that 95% of novel new drug approvals by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the first half of 2018 were supported by Certara software or services. Those results emphasize how much modeling and simulation has become an integral part of regulatory submissions and highlight Certara’s leadership role in the field. Press release
Mustang Bio and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (“St. Jude”) announced that they have partnered and entered into an exclusive worldwide license agreement for the development of a first-in-class ex vivo lentiviral gene therapy for the treatment of X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency (“X-SCID”), also known as bubble boy disease. X-SCID is the most common form of severe combined immunodeficiency, affecting approximately one in 50,000 to 100,000 newborns worldwide. The therapy, which includes a low dose of busulfan prior to reinfusion of the patients’ own gene-modified blood stem cells, is currently being evaluated in a Phase 1/2 multicenter trial in infants under the age of two at St. Jude, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco; and Seattle Children’s Hospital. This study, led by Ewelina Mamcarz, Assistant Member at St. Jude, is the world’s first lentiviral gene therapy trial for infants with X-SCID. In addition, the therapy is being investigated in patients over the age of two in a second Phase 1/2 trial at the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”). The therapy was developed in the laboratory of Brian Sorrentino, Director of the Division of Experimental Hematology at St. Jude. Eight patients under the age of two with X-SCID have been treated to date, with results presented at the 21st Annual Meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy in May 2018. The therapy was well tolerated. In addition, six patients achieved reconstituted immune systems within three to four months following treatment, with the remaining two patients continuing to progress favorably in earlier stages of recovery. Two of these six patients have discontinued monthly infusions of intravenous immunoglobulin, and the remaining patients, at earlier stages of recovery, continue to progress favorably. In three patients who had disseminated infections prior to therapy, all infections resolved completely. Press release
Quartzy announced its plan to help labs across the United States save even more on supply shipments with free standard shipping for all orders over $99. While already offering attractive shipping terms for many popular products, this new free shipping program is aimed at helping labs further consolidate their supply procurement efforts. “Streamlining supplier relationships has been top of mind for many of our members who are looking at ways to make their costs more predictable and supply chains more reliable,” said Jayant Kulkarni, Quartzy’s Founder and CEO, in a press release. “As our members look to consolidate their purchasing activity, we wanted to make that transition easier by eliminating the excess costs associated with these larger orders.” Over the last few months, Quartzy users have gravitated towards using Quartzy as their primary source for their lab supply needs. Reliance on the Quartzy Shop has increased considerably as the platform has grown its product portfolio beyond three million SKUs and expanded its supplier partnerships and agreements to over 1,000 of the life science industry’s top suppliers and manufacturers. With the introduction of free shipping, the transition to using Quartzy as the procurement platform of choice for users, is now even easier. In addition to supporting order consolidation, Quartzy members can also take advantage of free standard shipping on over 2.7 million products for smaller orders with many popular suppliers across the platform. This will enable added savings and convenience for labs consolidating orders that may, from time to time, need to make smaller last minute purchases. Press release
Pure Storage announced the acquisition of privately-held, Sunnyvale, California based software company StorReduce, a cloud-first software-defined storage solution for managing large scale unstructured data. The acquisition allows Pure Storage to add sophisticated deduplication technology to its object storage portfolio and expand its public cloud integrations to meet the growing demand to manage unstructured data in multi-cloud environments. StorReduce's cloud-optimized technology reduces storage and bandwidth costs, enabling flash plus cloud solutions across a variety of use cases, including data tiering, migration, and protection. StorReduce has been recognized for its innovative technology, recently named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Storage. In the same report, Gartner noted that developing a private/hybrid/public cloud strategy is the number one issue facing organizations today, cited by one in three organizations as their primary challenge. "We are excited to be joining the Pure Storage team. StorReduce and Pure Storage share a common goal to empower customers to get the most out of their data in the increasingly hybrid cloud world," StorReduce CEO Vanessa Wilson said in an official statement. "With the combination of StorReduce's data reduction capabilities and Pure's flash and object storage technologies, we can now optimize many modern cloud-native applications as well as many existing unstructured data workloads, in particular rapid recovery, at a faster rate." Press release
GenScript test launched its new open-access plasmid platform, namely MolecularCloud. The free platform aims to accelerate innovation in biology by promoting sharing of wisdom and supporting conversation among researchers. "We reached an important milestone on our way to revolutionize how research is done," said Eric Wang, VP of Marketing at GenScript, in a press release. The new platform originates from a popular service offered by GenScript since 2015, known as CloneArk. This free service allows clients to archive clones from past orders at GenScript for future reuse. Three years into its launch, there are about one million clones in CloneArk system with deposits growing fast every day. "There are many benefits to use CloneArk," explained Lihua Zhang, senior product manager in charge of MolecularCloud project at GenScript, in an official statement. "For example, a researcher may repeatedly need the same piece of sequence during his/her project. For a 1500 bp gene, the cost of de novo synthesis is about $525 while CloneArk-based synthesis would only cost about $125; up to $300 saving per clone, not to mention the time saved in the process." According to Zhang, in 2018 requests for CloneArk-based synthesis will reach 45,000, indicating that GenScript will save as much as $13M in funding for the global research community. Press release
ValGenesis announced a strategic partnership with NNIT, a leading provider of IT services and consultancy. Validation activities in the life-science sector are still almost entirely manual and paper based, and the process is usually inefficient, costly and prone to error. As the global leader in Enterprise Validation Lifecycle Management Solutions (VLMS), ValGenesis enables companies to manage their entire IT validation lifecycle electronically. The cloud-based ValGenesis solution helps life sciences companies eliminate the use of paper and remove the inefficiencies that plague today's IT validation processes. It enables rigorous compliance, helps to address data integrity concerns, improve consistency and reduce validation cycle time significantly. "We partner with the first mover in this niche area to help more life sciences companies say goodbye to paper," says Bo Olsen, General Manager of NNIT US, in a press release. He continues: "ValGenesis' software is developing into a de-facto standard on how validation should be assured and managed because companies adopting ValGenesis are realizing significant improvement (consistency, compliance and cycle time reduction) in their validation processes." Press release
DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced it is rapidly hiring engineers, support, and sales team members for its newly-created Server Virtualization, Analytics, VDI, Container and DevOps division. The new division will focus on helping enterprises get the most value out of their flash, virtualized and containerized hybrid cloud environments. The company is targeting to complete this round of hiring by the end of September. “We are well on our way to achieving a critical team size of 100 people for our development, support and delivery of leading flash-based enterprise virtualization, analytics, and containerized storage solutions," said Alex Bouzari, DDN CEO and co-founder, in a press release. Recent senior hires include: Jagan Raghu, former Tintri VP engineering; Sven Oehme, former IBM elastic storage chief research strategist; Phil Trickovic, former Tintri VP sales for Americas East Coast, Latin America and Federal; Peter Jones, former Intel director of engineering; Mark Walsh, former Tintri European operations leader; Andreas Dilger, former Intel principal engineer; Graham Breeze, one of Tintri’s first employees and field CTO; and Marty Murphy, former Tintri channels leader for the Americas East Coast. Press release
