NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Spanish bioinformatics firm Integromics said today that it has joined an EU-funded consortium that is developing new methods for managing massive genomics data sets and trying to make them more useful in the clinical realm.
Integromics said the partners in the project — called High Performance, Cloud and Symbolic Computing in Big-Data Problems applied to Mathematical Modeling of Comparative Genomics, or Mr. SymBioMath — intend to develop new software and data analysis tools that will speed up the adoption of personalized genomic medicine in the clinic.
Mr. SymBioMath is backed by €2.6 million ($3.4 million) from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme and is being coordinated by the University of Malaga's (UMA) Laboratory of Bioinformatics and Information Technology.
The project, which launched last month and runs through 2017, also includes partners at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Munich (LRZ), the Johannes Kepler University of Linz (JKU), RISC Software of Austria, and Spain's Carlos Haya Hospital.
These collaborators will focus on developing ways to transmit large amounts of genomic data, optimizing genetic comparison models, and creating new ways of visualizing these data sets.
JKU will create new comparative genomics models and identify correlations between genetic variation and patients' phenotypic responses to specific treatments. UMA and RISC will supply the supercomputing infrastructure and will develop applications for collecting, delivering, and displaying test information, while LRZ will seek to enhance visualization and virtual reality hardware and software tools for analyzing interconnected genomic datasets.
The partners will use data from the National Allergy Network to validate the software solutions they develop.
"Integromics will contribute from a commercial perspective", company CTO Juan Elvira said in a statement, specifically in the design of applications that are compatible with computers, tablets, and smartphones.