Case Study: German Cancer Research Center achieves minute-level whole-genome analysis with Datameer

Using Big Data Analytics to Create Better Outcomes for Cancer Patients

DKFZ, Germany’s largest biomedical research institute, faced a major analytics challenge: analyzing petabytes of raw genomic data from thousands of cancer patients to identify DNA changes that drive individualized disease and treatment response. Existing workflows and even high-performance clusters took weeks or months per patient, and data-reduction shortcuts that sped processing to 24–48 hours risked losing critical information.

By deploying Datameer on a Fujitsu PrimeFlex Hadoop cluster, DKFZ can now analyze complete, unreduced patient data sets in parallel—often in 5–20 minutes—processing about 10 TB of raw data per day (roughly 140 billion records). This speed preserves granular findings (such as exons and exon gaps), enables faster identification of personalized therapies, and accelerates genomics research without the information loss of prior methods.

German Cancer Research Center