Genome Analysis Software, a Google and Broad Institute Initiative

Tech companies are going to get the ultimate service for their Cloud Platforms as Google has partnered with Broad Institute to offer the bio-medical research organization’s DNA analysis software to them.

Google Genomics will be the platform where the institute’s Genome Analysis Toolkit will run in. Google Genomics is the cloud service for life sciences research of the company. Google positions the service as a platform for storing and analyzing the world’s genomic data.

Google stated on Wednesday that only a limited set of users are availing the hosted service. Now the question is how many researchers can initially use the service or when it would be available to more scientists? The company didn’t immediately reply to that.

The unique point of the software offered by the Broad Institute is that the scientists use it to analyze genomic data for free to academic researchers and non-profits while businesses are charged with licensing fee. All users will have to pay to use Google’s cloud as the model will be applied to the cloud version of the software. Google didn’t provide pricing information for the service also.

According to the Broad Institute, as analyzing the large data sets found in bio-medical research requires robust computing power, placing the toolkit in Google’s cloud will give the researchers the necessary processing power without setting up the accompanying IT infrastructure. Researchers say that the data provided by one genome needs approximately 100GB of storage.

The organization said that the institute’s software has been used till now by approximately 20,000 scientists to analyze genetic information. The organization can work with other businesses also as the partnership between Google and the institute isn’t exclusive.

There are other  top companies like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon who are also applying cloud computing to health care and biomedical research. In this case, Google isn’t the only tech company in the market. So this will definitely be a challenge for Google to stay ahead.