The Covid-19 outbreak has opened a new chapter in the global pharmaceutical industry, as companies have to develop vaccines and treatments faster than ever before.

Usually, developing a new drug takes more than a decade from substance discovery to commercialization.

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic early this year, however, some multinational pharma has completed the development of vaccines and treatments in less than a year to help the global community return to their daily lives.

Still, many health experts point out that the coronavirus is probably not the last pandemic the world will see. Such being the case, the experts stress the need to develop a platform that will allow the development of a safe and effective treatment even more rapidly during another global pandemic situation.

It is against this backdrop the Lenovo Data Center Group believes that precision medicine based on the company’s genome sequencing software may be able to provide a solution to solving such medical challenges in the future.

“Our data center group focuses on evaluating the latest high-performance computing (HPC) technology to bring innovation and reduce the time for scientific insight in a variety of areas,” said Mileidy Giraldo, the global lead at Lenovo Data Center Group’s Life Sciences, HPC & AI division, in an online interview with Korea Biomedical Review.

According to Giraldo, the company has been using this technology in building a robust capability around “omics analytics,” which includes various areas, such as genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, as nearly all biomedical projects depend on HPC.

“This is because sequencing and genomic costs have been brought down dramatically in the past two decades, and it is now easier to scale with the current technology,” Giraldo said. “The whole process now only costs about $1,000 and a few days, which is drastically cheaper and shorter compared to the first genome sequencing in 1990, which took 13 years and $3 million to conduct.”

Even during the Covid-19 treatment landscape, many companies have been using omics analytics to tackle unknown problems such as infection mechanisms of Covid-19 and the host’s immune response, Giraldo added.

However, Giraldo stressed that to make it more scalable, there is still a need to make genome processing fast, affordable, easy to use, and secure.

“To this end, Lenovo has launched GOAST (Genomics Optimization and Scalability Tool) system, which can improve costs and time even further compared to current conventional technologies, in November,” she said. “Traditionally, processing a whole-genome sequencing (WGS) requires a time scale measured in days, but the GOAST system configuration delivers results in just under an hour by only using central processing units (CPU).”

No other companies can deliver such results without using expensive specialty hardware, such as GPUs (graphics processing unit) and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays). The problem with using specialty hardware is that most organizations, including small labs, can’t afford them, she added.

GOAST offers two variants -- GOAST Base that is cost-efficient, and GOAST Plus, which has more performance capabilities.

“Both systems offer a specifically tuned hardware with the right HPC parts, optimizing genomics, and pre-configured software to maximize the HPC resource available to the workflow,” she said. “By using the GOAST system, labs can improve productivity and increase through the output of genomics analytics.”

The system is also more affordable, easy to use, and versatile, she added.

Asked about the short- to long-term goals for GOAST, Giraldo said that the company aims to get this solution out to those who need it and ultimately install it everywhere, ranging from small labs to big pharmaceutical companies.

“Also, we want to lower the barriers of usability,” she said. “Anyone can create a great solution, but if it is not easy to use, there won’t be any acceptance for that technology.”

Therefore, the company will continue to make this technology easy to use, she added.

In the long term, Giraldo stressed that the company would continue to watch out for the latest technologies that come out to see if the company can continue to push the boundaries of the system’s performance more.

Giraldo also showed high interest in launching the GOAST system in Korea.

“I know that Korea has significant capacity in terms of research or manufacturing biopharmaceutical and medical devices, expressing high interest in direct to consumer sequencing,” she said. “So I think that the organizations in Korea can gain a lot from using our solution as recent trends for Korean healthcare companies seems to be shifting to digital healthcare.”

Giraldo stressed that she sees Korea as a hub where tech meets healthcare, and both sides realize that they can help each other.

“Our solution could help various sectors of this intersection,” she said.