On Wednesday, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) quietly added an 800-pound gorilla to its arsenal.
Google Genomics, the company’s cloud-computing platform for life science research, added a tool called the Genome Analysis Toolkit (or GATK), which was developed by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
This amazing piece of software will help scientists quickly analyze genome-sequencing data. Before, this information was sectioned off in academic labs across the country. But as a service, it’s now online for academic researchers to use for free.
The best part however isn’t the accessibility, but all the possibilities that partnering with Google will offer.
The Genome Analysis Toolkit will now run on Google’s very powerful cloud-computing infrastructure, giving it the horsepower it needs to crunch the massive data sets of human genomic data — fast.
Sequencing human DNA generates colossal amounts of data. It’s like 100 gigabytes per person. The basic model for iPhone 6 only has 16! So for researchers, this is big news!
To date, the Broad Institute has either sequenced or genotyped the equivalent of more than 1.4 million biological samples. That’s a whole lot of data to have readily accessible! With the Google partnership, the Institute can now focus on its research without having to worry about managing IT infrastructure.
This trend in outsourcing the infrastructure of DNA processing is picking up across the biotech industry. Besides Google, there are several other companies starting to make a splash in this arena.
For my BioTech Intel Trader readers, that means opportunities to profit from the market plays behind this igniting industry… and many others in the health and biotech sectors.
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