Leading Biomedical Research Institution Uses Isilon Scale-out NAS to More Accurately Predict Effective Drug Therapies for Heart Disease, Cancer and Other Life-Threatening Illnesses

Isilon Systems today announced that Pharmacogenomics Centre, a partnership between Génome Québec and the Montreal Heart Institute focused on enhancing new and existing drug development research programs through the inclusion of genetic information, has deployed Isilon IQ to accelerate its next-generation genetic sequencing operations. In its focused efforts to fight heart disease, cancer and other life-threatening diseases, Pharmacogenomics Centre is leveraging Isilon scale-out NAS to significantly increase workflow efficiency and productivity, while reducing storage management from more than 30 hours per week to less than one hour per week.

"We're sequencing targeted segments of patients' DNA to try and identify individual mutations that can cause those patients to respond unexpectedly to specific drug therapies," said Christopher Beck, senior bioinformatician, Pharmacogenomics Centre. "Obviously the data produced by our next-generation sequencers is mission-critical but we are a scientific organization and our main focus is data analysis, not data storage. We simply can't afford the lengthy storage deployment schedules or complex system management hassles that traditional storage offerings require. With Isilon, we've been able to deploy and manage a high-performance, highly scalable, shared storage resource without having to dedicate any IT staff to managing the system."

With Isilon scale-out NAS, Pharmacogenomics Centre has unified both its DNA sequencing and DNA analysis operations onto a single, shared pool of storage, enabling highly concurrent processing of genomic data to increase productivity and speed time-to-results. Additionally, with Isilon's OneFS operating system providing 'pay as you grow' scalability, Pharmacogenomics Centre can scale both performance and capacity on-demand to meet the dramatic and unpredictable growth of data within its high-throughput sequencing environment.

"Next-generation genetics research is opening entirely new ways of undertaking critical drug discovery research," said Chris Blessington, senior director of marketing and communications, Isilon Systems. "Pharamcogenomics Centre's successful use of Isilon IQ to advance this new era of drug development is demonstrative of the inherent performance, capacity, and manageability advantages of our scale-out NAS solutions for data-rich life sciences organizations."