By Diagnostics World Staff
October 6, 2016 | Baylor Genetics wants to be a world class clinical diagnostics lab, and they believe they have found a tool to help them achieve that lofty goal. The genetics laboratory has recently announced that it has chosen DRAGEN, the bio-IT Processor developed by Edico, as its main pipeline for analyzing samples and delivering data. As part of the agreement, DRAGEN will be the primary platform for next-generation sequencing secondary analysis at Baylor Genetics.
Edico unveiled the DRAGEN Bio-IT Processor two years ago, and was nominated for Best Show at the 2014 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo. Since then, the DRAGEN Processor has been on a roll, receiving praise from Shawn Levy at HudsonAlpha and Stephen Kingsmore at Rady Children’s. Just today, Genewiz announced that they are implementing DRAGEN to accelerate their analysis of genomic data.
At Baylor Genetics, DRAGEN will support the testing portfolio, which includes its GeneAware reproductive carrier screen, rare disease diagnostic testing, and whole exome sequencing test. The deployment is in direct correlation with Baylor Genetics’ Ready With Answers Initiative, which is committed to improving turnaround times, customer service support, user-friendly billing and innovative genetic counseling services.
The partnership has been in the works since shortly after the conception of Baylor Genetics in 2014, a joint venture between Miraca Holdings and Baylor Genomics.
Baylor Genetics staff had been seeking to upgrade their environment to better support the needs of the business. Ron Zoppo, Baylor Genetics’ IT Director, wanted a data analytic review tool (DART), or “one place that the directors could go to perform the review of [clinical testing] results with the curation and the analysis.”
From there the company laid out a plan to create an application architecture to improve turnaround time. “We wanted to look at what pipeline products were out on the market,” Zoppo recalled when speaking with Diagnostics World about the process Baylor Genetics went through to improve their pipeline. “And that’s where DRAGEN fit in... We had positive feedback and cooperation with the Edico team and we did a bunch of testing on samples that we had run through an existing pipeline and compared them against [DRAGEN’s] pipeline. We wanted to validate the speed and the accuracy of [DRAGEN], so we did some very robust testing of the product and everything that [Edico] claimed it could do it did do.”
Speed is key when it comes to analyzing samples and receiving the results of those analyses; Baylor Genetics is currently analyzing close to 800-1,000 samples a day. But that is not the only advantage DRAGEN brings to the table. Zoppo says that DRAGEN boasts an impressive accuracy in its analysis as well as having speed. “Speed in and of itself doesn’t get you anywhere if it’s not accurate… If I’m not accurate, then speed doesn’t really benefit me,” Zoppo said.
Baylor Genetics was also enticed by the resources Edico is currently developing, including a cancer product coming out later this month. Zoppo had nothing but praise for Edico when speaking with Diagnostics World. “High marks to their team. They were extremely professional and engaged at every step of the process.”
Presently Baylor Genetics is busy implementing DRAGEN’s software. Although they do not have hard numbers to present, Zoppo is certain that DRAGEN will be a marked improvement once the software is installed. “We haven’t had any hard number estimates for impact on volume at this point in time,” Zoppo said in a later email interview. “But we do [know] it will allow us to be more productive, run and analyze more samples in a shorter period of time, [and] so reduce our costs and turnaround time (turnaround time is a client satisfaction issue). So we know [it] will improve our ability to compete in the market but haven’t put any numbers to it at this point in time.”
Zoppo is looking forward to how DRAGEN will serve the Baylor community. “The Ready With Answers initiative combines the level of expertise of our directors with a high level of efficiency and accuracy in our IT environment is an unbeatable solution. And when you can bring a product like DRAGEN to the table, I just think that’s a winning combination that distinguishes ourselves from the competition.”