Dell today announced its extended partnership with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) to help clinical researchers and doctors globally expand the reach and impact of the world's first Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved precision medicine trial for pediatric cancer.
The renewed commitment includes an additional $3 million Dell grant to support continued collaboration with TGen and support the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium's (NMTRC) expanded pediatric cancer clinical trials in EMEA, starting with sites in France and Lebanon. This is the second grant Dell has provided TGen to accelerate treatment of pediatric cancer, bringing its total contributions to more than $15 million since 2011.
The grant will also allow TGen to use Dell technology to bring genomic sequencing to point of diagnosis and enable TGen to extend its capabilities past pediatric cancer to support sequencing for other medical conditions affecting children including rare childhood diseases. By leveraging the capacity of Dell's technology infrastructure, TGen is able to redirect some of its attention and resources to research rare disease sequences and help families get answers more quickly.
With most large hospitals lacking the time and budget to research pediatric cancer treatments, TGen's aim is to reach and treat as many children as possible. However, when looking to support patients globally, it realized that it could no longer manage all of its data processing from the U.S. With time running out for many of its patients, TGen needed a solution that it could trust and that would reduce the amount of time needed to find and sequence genomic data. Based on a successful partnership in the U.S, TGen and Dell decided to extend its partnership and expand its support to EMEA.
'Time is of the essence in our line of work so we're constantly undergoing vendor evaluations to try to find the right tool for the job. Dell understands what we're trying to accomplish -- not an easy claim in the world of quick-fire genome sequencing -- and it has the partnerships and hardware to help us do it,' said James Lowey, TGen Vice President of Technology.
TGen's extended partnership with Dell will help it optimize a high-performance computing infrastructure to enable researchers to analyze and store massive amounts of genetic data more quickly and reach more patients than ever before. To date, TGen has been able to increase the number of computational hours by 376 percent and reduce the time it takes to analyze a patient's molecular data -- a process that used to take ten days -- to six hours. These results will now be replicated in EMEA, as the infrastructure scales easily to handle the increased number of patients across the new sites.
'We are proud to help TGen in EMEA gain the speed and efficiency it needs to ensure that more children can benefit from timely, local and effective treatment. Pediatric cancer is an issue that affects too many lives and we are committed to delivering benchmark solutions and support to ensure that the team at TGen are able to focus on this most important of work,' said Aongus Hegarty, President, Dell EMEA.
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