ITMI partners with Cloudera

The partnership will assist to securely analyse massive collections of clinical and genomic data in translational medicine research

Cloudera, provider of the modern platform for machine learning and advanced analytics built on the open source technologies, has partnered with Inova Translational Medicine Institute (ITMI), a global medical research institute. ITMI has deployed Cloudera Enterprise to securely analyse massive collections of clinical and genomic data at unprecedented speeds and scale for faster innovations in translational medicine research.

Reportedly, as part of the Inova Center for Personalised Health (ICPH), ITMI’s team of scientists, researchers, analysts and collaborators use machine learning algorithms on terabytes of clinical and genomic information to identify the genetic links to diseases. They make discoveries from the data insights and, in collaboration with the treating physician, develop personalised treatment plans for patients. This approach is also known as precision medicine and has the power to help patients live longer, healthier lives.

“The challenge for ITMI researchers and scientists was to analyze our highly complex, massive collection of raw data faster and more efficiently and translate insights into practical patient care. We’re now able to get answers in minutes and seconds and can find correlations that we couldn’t see before,” said Aaron Black, Chief Data Officer, ITMI. “Our researchers used to spend 80 per cent of their time on data wrangling and only a sliver of time on the analytics. We’re in the process of reversing that. We can now accelerate the pace of genomic discovery and dramatically change the way we interact with our research teams. We believe that will improve our ability to provide the right treatments to the right patients and ultimately, improve outcomes. What Cloudera has done is made this imminently possible.”

The company release informed, Cloudera’s analytic database powered by Apache Impala brings SQL analytics to big data. With the flexibility, scale and speed Cloudera provides, ITMI’s team will apply multi-user concurrency and high-performance analysis of genomic data gathered from mothers, fathers and infants enrolled in various familial base studies. For example, ITMI has been able to leverage its clinical and genomic analysis expertise to help discover previously undiagnosed congenital anomalies in infants.