Mon, 01/13/2014
Customer is a clinician in Spain, and wonders how long it would take for NGS analysis results from our facility in Iowa, US to get back for his patients in Madrid.
Mon, 01/13/2014 at 9:51 AM
AccuraScience LB: A NGS-based study consists of two components: (1) Carrying out NGS experiments, and (2) Performing data processing, analysis and interpretation. Although we do not do the experiments (component 1) directly in our own facility, I will share my understanding with you on this topic. Indeed, sequencing facilities all over the world are heavily backlogged. The typical turn-around time for completing a NGS experiment is about 2 months. This long turn-around time may not be too bad for basic research applications, and may be tolerable for some types of clinical studies, but is apparently a big problem for other types of clinical studies that directly involve diagnosis and treatment of patients. Some interesting discussions about this topic were made in these articles: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23076269, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22868263 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23478348. Apparently, there are some issues, logistics and others, that need to be addressed before NGS becomes a really efficient clinical tool for diagnosis and/or treatment purposes.
If we put these issues aside, it is fair to say that technically, the data processing, analysis and interpretation component (component 2) is generally regarded as more challenging and the rate-limiting step for carrying out a NGS-based study. This is where AccuraScience's expertise comes to play. It might come as a surprise to you that even considering the long distances (e.g. between Madrid and our facility in the U.S.), our turn-around time for data processing/analysis/interpretation is often only a fraction of that for the experimental component. It can be argued that it's much easier to transfer data across the globe than it is to transfer patient samples... For example, based on our current volume of activity, the turn-around time for a batch of exome data processing, analysis and interpretation for 100 patients is estimated to be ~7 days.
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Note: LB stands for Lead Bioinformatician. An AccuraScience LB is a senior bioinformatics expert and leader of an AccuraScience data analysis team.
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