The Challenge:
Almac Diagnostic Services are a personalised medicine company focused on the discovery, development and commercialisation of diagnostic and companion diagnostic tests. They have unique expertise in working with multidimensional genomics data and utilising a disease subtyping approach to diagnostic development. Almac’s highly complex and innovative bioinformatics pipeline incorporated multiple technologies and was labour and compute intensive with a full run of the pipeline taking 1-3 weeks, depending on the dataset complexity, with around 15 manual steps.

The Solution:
Almac worked with Analytics Engines to migrate its proprietary processes and algorithms to Analytics Engine’s XDP™. The Analytics Engines platform utilized big data technologies to streamline the process using scalable storage and scalable compute to industrialise the analytics. Analytics Engines re-architected and optimized the pipeline to take advantage of the big data platform.

The Benefit:
The pipeline can now be set up to run with 15 minutes of hands on time and results returned within 3-4 hours. Depending on the complexity of the dataset and analysis, this saves 20-50 hours of FTE per analysis and enables Almac to take a data driven discovery approach. The pipelines are now run reliably, reproducibly and repeatably with a full audit trail.