ACADEMIA

Appistry announced a strategic partnership with the University of Missouri to further enhance the school’s innovative genomic research. Through the partnership, the University of Missouri will deploy Ayrris/BIO, Appistry’s high-performance pipeline automation technology, to accelerate their Next Generation Sequencing and bioinformatics capabilities. In addition, the collaborative program supports the advancement of bioinformatics, genetic pipelines and applied high performance computing, signifying the commitment of both organizations to fostering increased regional collaboration across the Midwest.

Through the UM Bioinformatics Consortium, a resource for high-performance computational infrastructure geared toward facilitating inter-campus communication and bioinformatics research collaborations, the University of Missouri has emerged as the Midwest’s leading innovator in genomic research and data analysis. While the university’s agricultural genomics research continues to generate insightful returns, with computational data storage nearing capacity, the deployment of a data life cycle management system emerged as a necessity. Appistry’s Computational Storage technology will eliminate data bottlenecks and manage workloads while enabling downstream bioinformatics at scale.

As part of the partnership, Appistry’s technologies will enable the University of Missouri to construct, manage and execute high throughput computing techniques to develop new pipelines for accurate, cost-effective and high quality genomic data analysis. The University of Missouri will deploy the Ayrris/BIO high-performance computing platform to increase the computational scale of their automated sequencing pipelines and alleviate their data management burden. The initial research projects using the appliance will be centered on plant and animal genomics work that is ongoing at the MU campus.

“We are really excited about the opportunities that this partnership with Appistry brings to the University,” commented Gordon Springer, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science and Scientific Director, University of Missouri Bioinformatics Consortium. “Our ability to quickly and efficiently carry out the early and secondary analysis of sequence data to answer important questions about plant, animal and human genomics problems with new state of the art technologies is like the opening of a new bridge on the path to discovery. Where we end up is unknown, but that’s what makes it so exciting; to be able to discover new things about ourselves and nature.”

“The opportunity to partner with our state’s most influential research and academic organization is not only thrilling—it’s a critical development for the advancement of bioinformatics and next generation sequencing,” said Kevin Haar, CEO of Appistry. “Regional collaborations like this are necessary to accelerate innovation in life sciences and to complete the life cycle of genomic research and analysis in

order to support the advancement of personalized medicine and other medical breakthroughs.”