Cloud, Genes and Covid-19

Is genomics a real key factor to understand the different patients’ responses to Covid-19? The initial answer seems to be YES.

One of the first indicators was early this year on a preliminary UK study focus on 2600 Twins infected by SARS-CoV-2 reflects up to 50% the influence of genes. And that conclusion is significant.

Actually, there are lots of Genetics based studies running, some examples can be found here:  https://www.covid19hg.org/

One very promising international study running is lead and coordinated by Anxo Carracedo team group from Medicina Xenomica from Universidad Santiago de Compostela in Spain and other 20 different institutions and Hospitals in different countries on 8000 Covid-19 ICU patients to identify the suspicions genes involved.

One of the challenges that some of these studies face is work with big cohort number of patient’s data (at population level) from different sources and formats. Get an individual gene sequencing (read the full DNA chain) and variant calling analysis (the variant for that specific person compared to a standard reference) and cross-analyze with other patients requires huge investment in time, cost, and computational capabilities (like compute power, storage capacity, big data analytics, easy data share and collaboration between different research collaborators entities, scalability, consistency, automation, etc..).

Computing Cloud (Cloud Genomics) provides the solution on this challenge not only on the platform ones, but also in providing amazing innovative analytics technologies (like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, etc..) that facilitates the valuable conclusions.

Of course, there are also other factors, like the different regulations managing sensitive private health data, the data silos and not only by technical reasons, but also for institutional scopes or regional/local politics, etc...

On this aspect each country is on different maturity states, but actual situation demands an improvement on this area to facilitate collaboration.

One great example is the recent news about Collaborative Spanish Variant Server. CSVS is a crowdsourcing initiative to provide information about the genomic variability of the Spanish population to the scientific/medical community. Starting with 2000 local genomes is a very promising initiative in my opinion http://csvs.babelomics.org/

My congrats to the different organizations that participate on this initiative like Ciberer, Fundacion Progreso y Salud, Instituto Carlos III, Universidad de Navarra, Universidad Malaga, etc..

We never face a challenge like this COVID-19 Pandemic scenario before with so huge personal and economic impacts, but we now have the Tools with Innovative Cloud Technologies that will allow us to SUCCESS the actual situation.