(Fortune Magazine, April 23, 2015) – Genome sequencing has the potential to enable huge advances in “precision medicine”–genetically tailored treatments for leukemia, cystic fibrosis, and other devastating diseases. A new partnership between Intel Corp. and startup Edico Genome, announced this week, could make the distance between the sequencing and the treatment considerably shorter.
The partnership would pair Edico Genome’s Dragen high-speed DNA sequence analyzer with Intel’s high-powered Xeon processors to accelerate the speed at which genomic sequences can be analyzed. Announcing the partnership this week, the companies estimated that Dragen and Xeon, working together, would be able to analyze a patient’s entire genome in real time. Until recently, it typically took 10 to 20 hours to analyze data from a single genome, and in practice, backlogs and other delays can mean a long wait between sequencing and diagnosis.