Bionano Genomics to Support Largest Study to Date on COVID-19 Disease Susceptibility - Seite 2

“The unprecedented challenge of COVID-19 requires the world’s top technology leaders to team up to fight for a vaccine,” said Shawn Hansen, COO of Rescale. “Now that cloud supercomputing resources have become available at no cost, leaders like Bionano are proving they can accomplish in hours what would have previously required days. We hope other market leaders will join the Tech Against Covid initiative to learn more about how they can accelerate research using cloud computing.”

“As we face the threat of COVID-19, we understand the significance of accelerating how fast researchers and scientists can drive time-to-insight,” said Barry Bolding, Director, High Performance Computing, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “AWS is proud to be working with Bionano Genomics and Rescale to offer complimentary fully managed HPC capability that ramps up scientific data analysis quickly.”

Dr. Thomas Illig, head of the Hannover Biobank commented: “In the past 18 years, novel coronaviruses have triggered two epidemics and the current COVID-19 pandemic, of which the full extent still can’t be predicted. Rapid measures are required to stop the current pandemic and to better prepare ourselves for new coronaviruses in the long term. We are thankful for the support of the Hannover Medical School, Bionano Genomics, Rescale, AWS, and Genoox, who allow us to scale to the needed study size. The Hannover Medical School and our teams at the RESIST cluster are ready to rapidly deploy this large, most powerful study on the human body’s fight against COVID-19.“

Erik Holmlin, PhD, CEO of Bionano Genomics commented: “We believe that this study to identify genomic variants that influence the COVID-19 disease progression and intensity is an important step in the development of novel, targeted, antiviral therapies or vaccines. We believe that Bionano’s genome imaging technology is the only technology capable of detecting the structural variants that could protect against or predispose patients to the viral infection. After the first study started in the initial epicenter of the epidemic in Wuhan, we are now expanding the scope to other geographical areas including Europe. The research team will make the results from these studies available to the medical and research community, with the hope to help bring this global pandemic to a halt.”