The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, Office of Advanced Molecular Detection (OAMD), and Edico Genome have entered into a research collaboration to evaluate the performance of Edico Genome's DRAGEN hardware platform. The goal of this research collaboration is to evaluate the utility of the Edico Genome DRAGEN platform for public health and infectious disease applications. This collaboration also will focus on co-developing the databases, configurations and parameters to optimize the hardware platform for microbial applications.

With the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and other high-throughput laboratory technologies, there is an increasing need for robust high-performance computing and bioinformatics capacity. CDC's OAMD currently is responsible for the CDC High Performance Computing Center of Excellence, which includes multiple Linux clusters, virtualization capacity and supports CDC laboratories and the broader public health user community for scientific computing and technical sequencing requirements.

Edico Genome recently announced the availability of DRAGEN, a custom coprocessor platform that uses field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to provide hardware-accelerated analysis of genomic sequence data. While this technology has primarily been applied to the analysis of human genomes to date, it has the potential to replace or supplement large computational clusters and/or cloud services that are currently used for microbial genomic and metagenomic analysis, resulting in faster, more actionable time-to-answer and cost savings.