- Storage as-a-service Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) company recently announced that the McArthur lab at McMaster University is using Pure’s FlashBlade as its backbone in the fight against antibiotic resistance in superbugs through data
Storage as-a-service Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) company recently announced that the McArthur lab at McMaster University is using Pure’s FlashBlade as its backbone in the fight against antibiotic resistance in superbugs through data. Superbug resistance and the growing COVID-19 pandemic has been placing modern medicine under siege, but the McArthur Lab is fighting back. Somewhere in the millions of data points processed in the lab every day, there is a new treatment waiting to be discovered.
Genomics professor and researcher Andrew McArthur, Ph.D. is in charge of the lab. And he is using Pure’s technology to accelerate decision-making in the fight against life-threatening superbugs and viruses like COVID-19.
In order to support this mission, McArthur made the decision to use FlashBlade, which is known as the most advanced unified fast file and object storage platform designed to handle highly complex processes associated with massive genomic datasets. This helped speed up the time to research and seek cures for superbugs. And when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the lab was able to pivot immediately and leverage the innovative high-performance infrastructure already in place to combat the virus.
“There’s no point in playing with traditional storage because it’s just not fast enough,” said McArthur. “With Pure Storage we can stay ahead of the curve as we fight global threats to human health.”
Using data and the modern storage infrastructure from Pure, the McArthur Lab developed a tool for the international health sciences community that can help determine how the virus that causes COVID-19 is spreading and whether it is evolving. And this tool tracks how the virus changes over time, how it transmits between people, and how well it survives outside the body – it can help scientists understand if the virus has evolved between patient A and patient B.
“Data is critical to the daily insights in the lab,” added McArthur. “However, the vast and growing amount of information relies on near-instant processing times. By replacing our legacy storage infrastructure with Pure, we have the ability to gain insight into the virus through next-generation sequencing.”
As gene sequencing technology continues to advance, rapid scalability, and performance will remain critical to the lab’s efforts.
“The need to quickly identify and respond to global threats to human health has never been clearer,” explained Josh Gluck, Vice President of Global Healthcare Technology Strategy at Pure Storage. “With FlashBlade, researchers at McArthur Lab can continue to conduct research that has widespread global impact.”
