Parabricks Lands $750K SBIR Grant to Develop Secondary NGS Analysis Platform

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Parabricks, a startup maker of software for next-generation sequencing analysis, has won an approximately $750,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation to advance R&D on secondary genomic analysis.

The Michigan Emerging Technologies Fund added $125,000 on top of that to help the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company commercialize its technology.

The SBIR grant will enable Parabricks to build out its graphics processing unit-based software in the hopes of creating an end-to-end platform for researchers and clinicians alike, the company said today. Parabricks hopes to reduce NGS secondary data analysis processing time to less than an hour using the Broad Institute’s GATK4 pipeline.

“This award will significantly advance Parabricks’ efforts to … commercialize a very rich set of software solutions for research organizations, academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies, clinicians, and others who need fast, cost effective, and accurate genomic data processing, both on-premise and in the cloud,” CEO and Cofounder Mehrzad Samadi said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Parabricks partnered with DDN Storage to introduce a jointly integrated GPU and storage platform to speed up human genome analysis. At the time, the companies said that the offering could analyze 1,500 genomes per week, accelerating precision medicine workflows by 100x.

https://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/parabricks-lands-750k-sbir-grant-develop-secondary-ngs-analysis-platform#.W8DfxxNKi3U