This £500,000 project is part-funded by the UK’s national innovation agency, the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and is carried out by Eagle Genomics, a leading open-source bioinformatics service provider, in collaboration with the myGrid/Taverna team and Cytocell Ltd., with assistance from NGRL, based at the Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and the NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre.
The project will build upon the success of the Taverna Workflow Management System in next generation sequencing to enable medical researchers who are developing and testing new treatments to compare large amounts of information analysed and stored on a cloud and find common genetic links.
The technology will also help clinicians to look at an individual patient’s genetic make-up to aid diagnosis and ongoing treatment.
Rather than simply testing a patient for one suspected condition, using the cloud technology could allow clinicians to test for a much wider range of complaints.
Currently, the NHS IT systems do not have the resources to cope with the huge demands required. The cloud system can be accessed from a separate site, away from hospitals, freeing up space.
Eagle Genomics will work with the Taverna team to adapt Taverna to allow non-IT experts to easily add and extract information and share it with their colleagues.
