Biogen advances disease therapies through cloud-based AI on Databricks
Biogen migrated its on-premises genomics data infrastructure to Databricks for Genomics on AWS, using the UK Biobank's 500,000-participant dataset and machine learning models to identify genetic variants linked to human longevity and neurological disease, discovering two new drug targets for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Overview
Biogen migrated its on-premises genomics data infrastructure to Databricks for Genomics on AWS, using the UK Biobank's 500,000-participant dataset and machine learning models to identify genetic variants linked to human longevity and neurological disease, discovering two new drug targets for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
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Inspect the highlighted sourceThe challenge
Insufficient storage capacity in Biogen's existing data center made collecting and analyzing genomics data at scale impossible, and their network bandwidth couldn't handle transferring so much information; in 2018 these issues led to a one-week outage of Biogen's high-performance compute cluster.
The solution
Biogen collaborated with DNAnexus and Databricks to migrate its on-premises data infrastructure into the AWS cloud using Databricks for Genomics, and with Delta Lake took a pipeline that previously required 2 weeks to process 700,000 variants and optimized it to annotate 2 million variants in approximately 15 minutes.
Reported business value
By combining the DNAnexus platform with Databricks for Genomics, Biogen was able to use UK Biobank data to identify genes containing protein-truncating variants that impact human longevity and neurological status, leading to the identification of two new drug targets and insights into neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Sources
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