Reshaping genetics' data impact

Mapping the human genome and its importance in disease, beginning with the completion of the human genome project in late 2000, has revolutionized our ability to resolve, diagnose, and treat many diseases affecting the lives of billions of people. Both increased public awareness about the importance of genetic testing, and the steep decreases in the cost of these tests in recent years to currently under $1000, has made genetic sequencing more readily available to the public. These two aspects together, have resulted in a growing surge of clinically relevant genetic data production.

We, the Geneyx team, are already dealing with big data in genetics, surpassing what has previously been considered big. Genetic labs all over the world are creating petabytes of stored genetic data, which is rapidly growing toward Exabyte.

The DNA code as is, exposes the genome owner’s identity and many clinically relevant features, making it not GDPR/HIPAA compliant when stored in a regular fashion. Genetic data is highly sensitive personal data; therefore, it calls for the strictest privacy regulations. It should be stored carefully and used with caution, but it must be used in order to drive forward novel discovery and ever improving human health. Our main challenge at Geneyx is maintaining a careful balance between privacy and accessibility of the clinically relevant genetic data.

Storage of sensitive info and unique processing requirements pose the pillar of this serious challenge. Our solution combines innovation in fields of encryption, cyber security, classification and indexing, augmented with an intuitive analysis platform that provides effective data access, and providing a modular toolkit for downstream analysis needs of our customers. Current repositories and analysis toolkits offer incomplete solutions. They lack the sufficient diversification to truly capture human ethnic and geographic diversity, thus prohibiting true personalization of health care. On the other hand, they may offer a good analysis toolkit, but without the secured and easy access to genetic and clinical meta-data. The Geneyx platform has been developed to form a bridge between these two aspects, by creating an innovative end-to-end solution, enabling the researcher to focus on the science.

• Geneyx provides pharma companies, universities and research facilities with the most comprehensive, diversified and reliable genome-based databank supporting pre-clinical research, novel drug and  therapeutics  development.
• With Geneyx’s solution, Pharma companies can decelerate the declining efficiency of every dollar spent on drugs R&D and start to increase ROI  by finally, de-risking novel projects and putative drug leads using genomic-based analysis, all done without concern towards regulatory compliance on the researcher’s end.
• Geneyx databank is based on aggregating datasets (human sequenced exomes/genomes) from dozens of genetic labs around the world. This model allows parallel and rapid additions of new and relevant genetic data points. Additionally, this model enables our data consumers (i.e. research groups) to formulate a partnership with Geneyx, aimed at target expansion of the data bank, to represent sub-populations and pathologies that are strictly under-represented at the time of request.
• In order to drive meaningful research, genetic data has to be coupled with clinical and meta-data of the genome owner. Geneyx’s comprehensive genetic data bank is comprised not only of genetic data, but also of annotated clinical data (HPO) and the genome owner’s personal meta-data.
• Geneyx’s unique genome-wide privacy protection technology (patent pending) makes our genetic data bank fully GDPR / HIPAA compliant, allowing pharma and academic research groups to concentrate solely on R&D, rather than on legal entanglements purposed only at securing that no infringement of the genome owner’s privacy has occurred.
• Geneyx’s processing dashboard provides advanced query capabilities allowing researches to cross search meta-data, clinical data and genetic features, such as quality estimates, genomic coordinates etc. By doing so, researchers save time and computational resources on irrelevant data points and focus on targeting desired conditions only.
• Geneyx’s platform includes a user customized virtual, cloud based, environment that enables efficient, rapid and accurate processing of genetic data. This mode of operation will increase research groups’ workflow efficiency and intergroup communication in genetic data driven projects. All this translates to saving time, money and eventually lives by expediting drug and therapeutics development at a pace like never before.