Accelerating genetic diagnostics in patients
In France, Axians played a part in the implementation of DIAGHO, a genetic sequencing data interpretation portal, in a project developed by the university hospitals in Rennes and Nantes.
Major advances in genomics are opening up new prospects for patients with cancers and certain rare diseases. Genetic sequencing makes it possible to read and analyse an individual’s entire genome, allowing more personalised medicines and treatments adapted to each patient’s profile.
One of the countries pioneering the clinical integration of genome sequencing at national level, France is focused on knowledge-sharing and cooperation between healthcare establishments to address the scientific and medical challenges that are still complicating the interpretation of genetic data.
This collaborative approach led to the development of DIAGHO, a platform to assist the diagnosis of rare diseases based on ultra-high-throughput sequencing technologies known as Next-generation Sequencing (NGS). These technologies make it possible to identify, filter and analyse numerous genetic permutations in patients’ DNA and RNA.
The project was given the green light in 2019 from the cooperative healthcare group Hôpitaux Universitaires du Grand Ouest (GCS HUGO), which includes six major hospitals in Brittany, Pays de la Loire, and Centre-Val de Loire, along with the Cancer Institute of Western France, and two hospitals in Le Mans and Vendée.
One of the group’s challenges lay in making DIAGHO a sovereign entity and keeping the control of medical data subject to public governance by ruling out any external cloud hosting.
Two university hospitals led the project: CHU Rennes, which developed the platform, and CHU Nantes, which managed technical implementation with help from its long-established partner Axians.
So that it would operate on the computers in every hospital involved, regardless of the equipment in use, DIAGHO uses a technique known as containerisation. As Christophe Fogel, Senior Business Developer (Healthcare) at Axians, explains, “Containerisation involves packaging software applications together with their system libraries and dependencies into a single, lightweight executable known as a container, which operates consistently on any architecture. This means developers can create and roll out applications more quickly and with total security in any environment, whatever the operating system.”
Teams at the hospitals in Rennes and Nantes received technical training to help them be more autonomous in developing the platform further.