A French collaboration will develop advanced software to help doctors more easily make sense of data generated by the genomic analyses of patients' tumors.

Genetic analysis offers unprecedented power to diagnose tumors and target therapies, but it also brings the challenge of managing many gigabytes of data. Now, a French collaboration has formed to develop advanced scientific software that will help make sense of all this information.

The Interpretation of Clinical Exome, or ICE, project includes French cancer center Gustave Roussy; the French National Health and Medical Research Institute, known as Inserm, which is providing nearly $3 million; and two companies: the genomics services firm IntegraGen and an engineering and technology consulting firm, Sogeti High Tech. The four collaborators bring expertise in genomic sequencing, data management, software development, and clinical practice.

Bernard Courtieu, chairman and CEO of IntegraGen, says sequencing a single patient takes 20 gigabytes of data, and matching that with the dozens of targeted drugs expected to be approved in the next few years will be a major choke point in care. The main goal, he says, will be to match the patient's genomic profile with available drugs, something that will soon be too complex for doctors to do on their own.

The ICE Program also intends to provide what a U.S. oncologist describes as “genomic profiling for dummies,” so that doctors who have a limited amount of time to spend with a patient will be able to derive and share meaningful information about that person's profile.

The collaborators expect to complete an early version of the software in 2016, at which point the market for new genomic interpretation tools will be valued at around $5.4 billion, Courtieu estimates.

Other companies and collaborators are trying to solve the same data problems. What will set ICE's technology apart, Courtieu says, will be the focus on the doctor and patient, rather than maximizing the technology for its own sake. Doctors, he says, are “looking for meaningful actionable pieces of information.”

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