OHSU, Intel Partner On Genetics

Bernie Monegain | Healthcare IT News | April 22, 2013

Oregon Health & Science University and Intel Corp. are teaming up to develop next-generation computing technologies that advance the field of personalized medicine by dramatically increasing the speed, precision and cost-effectiveness of analyzing a patient's individual genetic profile.

Through a multi-year research and engineering collaboration announced April 22, engineers and scientists from the two institutions will develop hardware, software and workflow solutions for Intel's extreme-scale, high-performance computing solutions. This new level of computational horsepower seeks to make strides in addressing one of the biggest challenges in personalized medicine: how to cope with the unprecedented volume of complex biomedical data it generates, the partners said in a news release.

They said the collaboration combines Intel's strengths in extreme-scale computing capable of handling billions of complex computations simultaneously with OHSU's innovative four-dimensional approach in imaging and analyzing the molecular-level drivers of cancer and other diseases. OHSU's imaging techniques work like a Google map for cancer by providing a highly detailed view of how cells change over time at the molecular level along with a big-picture analysis of how the cells behave as a system.