Case Study: Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer achieves faster, simpler genomic and graph data management with ArangoDB

Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer ArangoDB for Genomes and Graphs

The Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) needed to manage a complex genomic graph — the whole human reference genome plus molecules and ~50k short patient sequences, totaling about 145k molecules and ~1M edges — while replacing a brittle, script-heavy Python system and avoiding rigid schema constraints. After evaluating options, IRIC selected ArangoDB for its C++ performance, Apache V2 license, multi-paradigm model and expressive AQL.

IRIC replaced its bulky dataset-management pipeline with a lean solution built on ArangoDB, consolidating documents and graphs and using AQL to replace lengthy Python scripts. The change made workflows faster and more maintainable, reduced bugs and enabled more experiments; import took about a week and operations such as updating 95k documents were effectively instantaneous, demonstrating ArangoDB’s performance on their ~1M-edge genomic dataset.

Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer

Tariq Daouda

Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer