By Clinical Informatics News Staff 

 

February 11, 2015 | GenoSpace this morning announced that the Inova Health System has selected GenoSpace Population Analytics to support its whole-genome sequencing initiative. The Inova Translational Medicine Institute (ITMI), a division of Inova Health System, has sequenced more than 8,000 genomes from individuals representing more than 100 countries. 

 

“A very high number of these genomes have a really high quality clinical dataset associated,” explained Daniel Meyer, COO of GenoSpace. “One of their challenges was taking all of this data—a large set of data as measured by the raw scale and size of the data but also the complexity and heterogeneity and quality of the genomic and clinical data—and making that data available to their clinicians and researchers.” 

 

Inova is a not-for-profit health care system based in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area that serves more than two million people. At its current rate of enrollment, ITMI will have sequenced roughly 20,000 genomes with corresponding comprehensive clinical data by the end of 2015. 

 

The GenoSpace platform that Inova has chosen is one of three offerings; Population Analytics focuses on analyzing sets of data, either patient-based or study-based Meyer explains. The tool provides a robust, scalable, and intuitive tool to discover disease associations within these large and complex data sets and enables the translation of these associations into the practice of medicine.

 

Mick Correll, co-founder and CEO of GenoSpace, says that Inova’s data challenges serve as a case study for the new age of population-scale genomics. 

 

“This is not the same scenario as a double-blind clinical study that sets out to answer a specific question,” Correll says. “The majority of this is a newborn screening study that is recruiting healthy, normal volunteers to participate and then tracking them longitudinally. We’ve got trios; we’ve got extended pedigrees… Today this is already 7,000 genomes with expression data, with methylation data covering a remarkably diverse population of individuals… How are we going to make any sensible decisions about the types of programs we could be supporting from this data if we don’t have any way of getting that first pass, exploring [those] data?” 

 

GenoSpace’s goal, Correll says, is to enable clinicians and researchers who have not previously had access to the data to dig into what Inova has been collecting. “The more people… who can access the data the better,” Meyer agrees. 

 

Inova is GenoSpace’s first publicly announced provider customer, though Meyer points out that GenoSpace offers a white label solution and all customers aren’t public. 

 

GenoSpace bills itself as a comprehensive platform suitable for users across research, clinical development, applied medicine, and clinical care. Most institutions work in more than one of those spaces, Meyer says. “We feel that it doesn’t make sense to have multiple silos of data for those activities, but rather makes sense to have a single storage and security platform on which a variety of applications can be spooled up to fit the needs of our customers.” 

 

“We selected GenoSpace for its experience deploying solutions for customers in R&D and clinical care, as well as the analytical capabilities of the platform. Like many providers pushing the envelope of genomic medicine, we needed an effective solution to the challenge of making petabytes of genomic data accessible to the scientists and physicians in our organization. GenoSpace enables our staff to efficiently gain insight from large quantities of complex information,” said Greg Eley, CTO of the Inova Translational Medicine Institute in a statement. 

 

Correll sees the provider customers as being a crucial frontier for GenoSpace and the precision medicine landscape. “We really pride ourselves in tackling some of the hardest problems that are facing precision medicine today. You can see a lot of that in that we’ve had such great success in working with commercial sequencing labs… but as the whole space matures, increasingly it’s going to be more important to push genomics and genomic findings into all the various corners of healthcare where it could be useful in making decisions.”