Bringing personalized medicine to citizens

Since the late 2000s, NGS technologies have dramatically reduced the cost and time of DNA sequencing. Advances in high-performance computing (HPC) technology mean that it is now possible to perform genomics sequencing for entire populations.

However, managing the massive volume and velocity of data—which ranges from 10 to 300 GB per sample—still presents tough technical challenges. Researchers must filter the raw data multiple times to make it useable for downstream clinical analysis—a demanding and resource-intensive process.

Abdulrahman Alasiri, Biomedical Informatics Director at Novo Genomics, explains: “Our ultimate goal is to be able to offer every citizen in the Kingdom access to personalized medical treatments based on their genes. In the past, there was no facility in the country that could perform genomics analysis on this scale. As a lean start-up, our objective was to deploy a HPC infrastructure that would enable us to bring the latest sequencing techniques to Saudi Arabia for the first time.”