Case Study: National Institute on Aging achieves rapid processing of 6,500 exomes to accelerate Parkinson’s research with Google Cloud Platform

National Institute on Aging Accelerating the fight against Parkinson’s Disease

The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the NIH and a major funder of research into age-related conditions, partnered with the International Parkinson’s Disease Genomics Consortium to reanalyze thousands of heterogeneous exome datasets. To remove technical artifacts and standardize results, researchers needed to realign, recalibrate, and re‑genotype 6,500 exomes (~200 TB) compiled from many labs and platforms—but consortium members lacked the local compute capacity to process that volume in a reasonable time.

NIA used Google Genomics on Google Cloud Platform to run the Broad Institute’s GATK Best Practices pipeline, processing the full 200 TB of raw sequence data into variant calls in just 3.5 weeks (versus months on local infrastructure). The cloud approach not only enabled secure, permissioned sharing with 50+ institutions and remote analysis, but also helped identify six new Parkinson’s risk loci and produced a high-quality dataset that will power multiple future studies while reducing cost through sustained-use optimizations.

National Institute on Aging

Mike Nalls

Staff Scientist