From KurzweilAI:
“It took around 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome,” says Peter White, PhD, principal investigator and director of the Biomedical Genomics Core at Nationwide Children’s and the study’s senior author. “Now, even the smallest research groups can complete genomic sequencing in a matter of days. However, once you’ve generated all that data, that’s the point where many groups hit a wall. … Scientists are left with billions of data points to analyze before any truly useful information can be gleaned for use in research and clinical settings.” To overcome the challenges of analyzing that large amount of data, White and his team developed a computational pipeline called “Churchill.” By using novel computational techniques, Churchill allows efficient analysis of a whole genome sample in as little as 90 minutes, the researchers claim. “Churchill fully automates the analytical process required to take raw sequence data through a series of complex and computationally intensive processes, ultimately producing a list of genetic variants ready for clinical interpretation and tertiary analysis,” White explains. “Each step in the process was optimized to significantly reduce analysis time, without sacrificing data integrity, resulting in an analysis method that is 100 percent reproducible.” The output of Churchill was validated using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) benchmarks. In comparison with other computational pipelines, Churchill was shown to have the highest sensitivity at 99.7 percent, highest accuracy at 99.99 percent, and the highest overall diagnostic effectiveness at 99.66 percent, according to the researchers.
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