COBIODE

COBIODE is a hardware system based on ASICs and FPGAs dedicated to the rapid analysis of genomic sequences. Its purpose is to speed up calculation times, consequently reducing costs; COBIODE’s ASIC makes it possible to increase the parallelisation of the calculation processes while keeping energy consumption low, so that this hardware will enable analyses that are currently unfeasible in useful timescales in the field of biological research and personalised medicine.

COBIODE proposes the use of HW consisting of 10 chips containing the Associative Memory (AM) cells and a System On Chip (SOC) containing FPGAs and ARM processors. The integration between SOC and AM chip allows exploiting both the potential and performance of a dedicated HW, as well as the flexibility of an FPGA and the computing power of an ARM CPU.

The device can be used in a variety of fields as it is capable of pattern recognition on any data. However, the areas that could benefit most from this technology are pharmacology and preventive medicine.

Genes contain patterns that predispose us to the risk of incurring certain diseases; genetic polymorphisms have been studied which, when associated with each other and combined with environmental influences, can greatly increase the risk of developing diseases. With preventive strategies it is possible to improve the quality of life and avoid the pathological development; in this sense, genomic profiling allows to perform multiple analyses on small samples to search for which mutations each patient expresses and allows to create the “molecular identity card” of each disease and tailor the best care for the individual patient, combining data on mutations with those from the affected organ.

COBIODE’s technology aims to speed up this process (in the order of a few minutes), so that the result can also be achieved in emergency and urgent situations, like in emergency rooms.