Chi-Biotech Co. Ltd. announced that after two years of efforts, it has successfully deployed its FANSe-based next-generation sequencing analysis solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The free-of-charge, accurate solution is now available to customers globally, which can significantly reduce costs and increase efficacy for precision medicine and scientific research around the globe.
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) parallelly sequences billions of DNA fragments. Aligning these reads to reference genome is the first step of almost all biomedical applications. Therefore, the accuracy and speed are both critical. As the instruments and experimental procedures have been long standardized, the current algorithmic pipelines are far from satisfactory: replicated tests of the same sample often yield completely different results, and the analysis often lasts days. Chi-Biotech developed FANSe series algorithms to tackle these problems. It prioritizes accuracy without compromising speed. In common applications such as genomic mutation calling and transcriptome quantification, it outperforms traditional algorithms such as Burrows-Wheeler Alignment (BWA) and Bowtie in accuracy and robustness, while also performing extremely fast. In 2020, it set the world record for human whole genome mutation analysis in just five minutes on a single computer, and still holds it today.
FANSe requires high-end server hardware to reach its extreme speeds, making it difficult for smaller enterprises and individuals to run it on their own computers. This led Chi-Biotech to begin establishing a cloud platform in 2014 to provide one-click NGS analysis services to customers. Nowadays, most of the NGS analyses on Chi-Biotech’s cloud platform are free and open to the public, so customers do not need to purchase their own servers or master complicated bioinformatics knowledge. Increasing numbers of international customers have expressed interest in using this remarkable algorithm and cloud platform. To better serve these international enterprises, Chi-Biotech has cooperated with AWS to run FANSe-based NGS analysis on local AWS data centers to meet legal requirements that sequencing data should not be transferred internationally.
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Dr.Gong Zhang, Co-Founder of Chi-Biotech said, “The FANSe-based NGS analysis has now been established on the AWS public cloud platform. It has solved the major issue of network bandwidth. Many users can upload their sequencing data simultaneously, unleashing the extreme efficiency of the FANSe algorithm. Results are available a few minutes after uploading when invoking sufficient server nodes. FANSe does not require any hardware acceleration such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) or graphic processing units (GPU), meaning that AWS can deploy this algorithm in all its current servers all over the world without extra costs, and can be easily updated for new application demands. The entire healthcare and scientific community around the world can take advantage of our ultrafast and accurate algorithm completely free of charge. People will get more accurate and cheaper genetic testing when using our system.”