Case Study: National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging achieves faster genetic discovery with Looker

National Institute on Aging - Customer Case Study

The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging faced a major challenge processing and sharing massive, inconsistent exome datasets for Parkinson’s research, with no local infrastructure large enough to handle 6,500 exomes. Using Looker-related Google Cloud/Google Genomics capabilities, the team needed a more secure and scalable way to analyze and collaborate on large biological datasets.

Looker helped enable a cloud-based solution on Google Cloud Platform that let researchers reanalyze the full 200TB dataset with Broad Institute’s GATK Best Practices pipeline in just 3.5 weeks instead of months. The result was a high-quality, securely shared dataset that helped identify six new Parkinson’s risk loci and gave the consortium faster, more cost-effective access to large-scale analysis resources.

National Institutes of Health

Mike Nalls

Scientist