The Hutch Report, June 2018

The Hutch Report – Genomics

“One thousand petabytes of genomic data are already being stored worldwide, and the aggregate cost of genomic storage is expected to grow from US $0.5 billion today to US $5 billion by 2021. There will be a need to reduce the footprint of genomic datasets in FASTQ and BAM, at the same time preserving genotyping accuracy in order to help reduce hardware storage costs”.

(…) “In 2016, MPEG and ISO TC 276 began working to produce MPEG-G, a new open standard to compress, store, transmit and process genome sequencing data. The standard plans to reach a compression factor for raw data of approximately 100 which means an improvement of up to one order of magnitude with respect to currently used formats. MPEG-G will provide new functionalities such as native support for sophisticated selective access, hooks to implement any data protection mechanism, flexible storage and streaming capabilities. This will enable various new applications, such as real-time streaming of data from a sequencing machine to remote analysis centers during the sequencing and alignment processes”.

(…) “Genomsys is located in Lausanne, Switzerland. They are among the first developers of MPEG-G based solutions to enable genomic applications with advanced features of data access and handling as well as with a dramatic reduction of both storage costs and transfer time from sequencing facilities to storage and/or analysis sites. They have to date received US$ 2 million in funding”.

Read the full report on Genomics and on the development of the MPEG-G Standard here