Dell announced an extended partnership with Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) to help clinical researchers and doctors expand the reach and impact of Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved personalized medicine trials for pediatric cancer.
The commitment includes an additional $3 million Dell grant to support continued collaboration with TGen and support the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium’s (NMTRC) expanded pediatric cancer clinical trials in EMEA, starting with sites in France and Lebanon.
The grant will also allow TGen to use Dell technology to bring genomic sequencing to point of diagnosis, and enable TGen to extend its capabilities past pediatric cancer to support sequencing for other medical conditions affecting children, including rare childhood diseases.
This is the second grant Dell has provided TGen to accelerate treatment of pediatric cancer, bringing its total contributions to more than $15 million since 2011.
“As for what makes Dell and TGen a good fit, the way TGen explains it is that Dell came in listening to what they were trying to do, and devised a solution fit for the challenges TGen was facing, as opposed to coming in trying to donate pre-packaged solutions that would not have met TGen’s needs,” Bruno Sarda, director of global sustainability operations for Dell, told eWEEK. “Another good fit is that TGen is trying to do to precision medicine what Dell initially did for computers–drive costs down significantly and democratize access so that it’s available to everyone.”
He explained TGen’s extended partnership with Dell should help it optimize a high-performance computing infrastructure to enable researchers to analyze and store massive amounts of genetic data more quickly and reach more patients than ever before.
Sarda pointed out that to date, TGen has been able to increase the number of computational hours by 376 percent and reduce the time it takes to analyze a patient’s molecular data, a process that used to take ten days, to six hours.
“International collaboration is critical to ensure IT solutions help the broadest patient population possible. There are incredibly bright and dedicated doctors and researchers across the world,” Sarda explained. “Cancer knows no boundaries. The power of technology and the kind of platform we’ve deployed at TGen is to enable data and knowledge sharing seamlessly so to accelerate and amplify the work done by researchers across the globe.”
He said connecting their high-performance computing solution with more doctors and hospitals globally, works to dramatically expedite lifesaving treatments for children.