NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Oregon Health and Science University and Intel have signed a multi-year partnership that will focus on building high-performance computing hardware and software solutions for analyzing molecular data from cancer and other complex diseases.
According to the university, the partners will establish a research data center equipped with an Intel supercomputing cluster. There, researchers will use OHSU's imaging and genomic analysis technologies to look for disease progression patterns in patients' tumors and to study treatment response, among other projects.
The partners intend to create highly detailed circuit diagrams of genomes that can be used to compare cancer patients' genomes with healthy ones. This will enable them to isolate and study genetic abnormalities and determine which ones are linked to cancer. They also intend to develop systems that can analyze a patient's cancer profile in a matter of hours at a cost that is feasible for clinical applications.
"By combining Intel's computing expertise with what we know about how to analyze genomes and to create images of how cells change over time, we believe we have the capability to develop the right tools to make significant progress in making the promise of personalized cancer medicine a reality for more patients," Joe Gray, associate director for translational research at the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, said in a statement. "This is likely to be a decades-long process, but along the way we expect that what we will learn in studying cancer will also provide insights into other complex diseases."
OHSU also said that as part of the partnership, Intel will support its efforts to develop and implement graduate and undergraduate curricula at the university to train the next generation of scientists and information technology professionals in the field of quantitative bioscience.