NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Translational Genomics Research Institute has received a $200,000 grant from the Nvidia Foundation, and plans to use the funds to further develop a prototype of a statistical tool for single-cell transcriptome data analysis.
Specifically, the funds will support TGen's efforts to use graphics processing units from Nvidia to reduce analysis times for the so-called Evaluation of Differential Dependency (EDDY) software, the institute said. With Nvidia GPUs, TGen anticipates being able to analyze thousands of transcriptomes in days compared to the months that are required when the software is run on central processing units. TGen said it will work with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco to apply the GPU-accelerated algorithm to data from a brain cancer study.
The TGen award comes from Compute the Cure, the Nvidia Foundation's philanthropic initiative to fund computational efforts to advance cancer research, diagnostics, and treatment, and to support non-profits that provide patient care and support services. Through this initiative, the foundation has donated nearly $3 million to cancer causes since 2011.
For example, in 2014, research teams from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Stanford University each received $200,000 grants from the initiative to apply their computational methods to cancer research. The Dana-Farber project sought to identify more effective therapies for treatment by analyzing tumor and clinical data collected from its patients. And the Stanford project sought to use a combination of molecular simulation and machine learning techniques to better understand and predict tumor mutations in breast cancer patients.
More recently, Nvidia announced a partnership with the National Cancer Institute, the US Department of Energy, and several national laboratories to build the Cancer Distributed Learning Environment, an artificial intelligence network that will support Vice President Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot initiative.