NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today announced a collaboration to analyze Edico Genome's bioinformatics platform.
Under the terms of the agreement, the CDC's Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD) in the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases will evaluate the utility of Edico's Dragen bioinformatics hardware platform for use in public health and infectious disease applications. They will also co-develop databases, database configurations, and parameters to optimize the hardware for microbial applications.
The OAMD runs the CDC's High Performance Computing Center of Excellence.
Financial and other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Dragen is a computer processor customized for hardware-accelerated high-throughput genome sequencing analysis and is pre-loaded with algorithms for next-generation sequencing analysis. San Diego-based Edico said in a statement that while Dragen has been primarily used for human genome analysis, it has the potential to replace large computing clusters and cloud services currently used in microbial genome and metagenome analysis.
Last month, Edico added the HudsonAlpha Institute to its client list and in April collaborated with Intel on the Dragen processor.