Telethon and Cineca: together to exploit the research

On 21 July 2015, Cineca and Fondazione Telethon (in brief: Telethon) signed a collaboration agreement that will provide Telethon researchers with highly advanced high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, storage facilities, data management services and analysis tools for the next three years.

The Cineca peer review process will be integrated into Telethon’s selection process to facilitate Telethon grantees’ access to Cineca’s HPC resources, starting from the next Telethon call for applications.

The agreement also foresees that Cineca and Telethon will identify areas of collaboration for the promotion of scientific research. Among these, the implementation of a data repository will enable Telethon researchers to safely store their data and share them within the scientific community while guaranteeing privacy through strictly defined access policies.

The long-term objective of the collaboration is to promote, support and exploit the bioinformatics and data processing of large volumes of data resulting from numerical simulations, next-generation sequencing analysis, genomics and proteomics and other clinical sources towards therapy development and personalized medicine.

“Our mission is to support the scientific and academic communities in their journey towards research, discovery and innovation. To achieve this, we provide state-of-the-art supercomputing solutions as well as highly sophisticated data processing and data management capabilities within our recently developed big data environment. The joint collaboration with Telethon is a great opportunity to exploit such a facility for the benefit of genetic diseases and the innovation of the Italian system in a fundamental socio economical domain such as medicine and life sciences” stated Sanzio Bassini, HPC Director at CINECA.

“Fondazione Telethon supports the best research on rare genetic diseases in Italy, with the goal of bringing effective therapies to patients. More than 260 research groups are currently engaged in Telethon research projects, and new ones are selected each year through a rigorous, peer reviewed selection process. Access to Cineca’s supercomputing and data repository services will benefit the Telethon scientific community by allowing optimal data analysis and regulated access to the data generated, in line with international guidelines.” stated Lucia Monaco, Chief Scientific Officer at Fondazione Telethon.

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