China to power WuXi NextCODE, the Google of human genome data
Beijing’s artificial intelligence ambitions and interest in clinical applications will help company stay ahead of competition
WuXi NextCODE (WXNC), a genomic data pioneer based in Shanghai, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Reykjavik, is leading the charge in helping pharmaceutical companies and others in health care unravel the promise of the human genome, first mapped and identified in 2003.
The company, acquired by Shanghai and US-based WuXi AppTec in 2015 and merged with AppTec’s Genome Centre in Shanghai, uses a proprietary platform to cut the “diagnostic odyssey” for someone with a rare disease to a matter of hours.
Its co-founder and CEO, Hannes Smarason, says WXNC’s tool does for medical researchers and clinicians what Google’s search engine did for internet users nearly two decades ago.
Each human genome has 3.2 billion “bases”, or bits of information, requiring about 150 gigabytes of storage. WXNC’s “genomically ordered relational database”, or GORdb, was designed specifically to store and analyse huge amounts of genetic code and index new genetic variations from genomes sequenced by the company, its partners and in every public data resource.
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“For the first time, technology has really come together in a unique way to enable an entirely new industry around low-cost data generation on people’s sequences. Together with the computational power and the emergence of artificial intelligence [AI], to then make sense of and use that information for a variety of purposes is really opening up this market to significant disruption,” Smarason said.