A new whitepaper, commissioned by Lenovo & Intel and led by IDC, highlights key challenges and drivers transforming the healthcare landscape across the Asia Pacific. Titled ‘Leveraging High-Performance Compute Infrastructure to Address the Genomic Data Challenge in Life Sciences’, the paper underlines humanity’s greatest challenges where genomics research-led intervention could impact significantly. 

A key highlight from the paper states that while the pandemic-led acceleration in innovation has given a boost to the Indian healthcare sector, genomics high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure that is key to drug/vaccine discovery & precision medicine, is still at a startup stage for nearly 57 per cent of surveyed organisations in India. This trend is also seen across a few other APAC regions surveyed: Japan and Korea lead in having advanced (3+ years) infrastructure.

The survey was conducted across 150 pharmaceutical and biotech companies across five key markets in Asia – India, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, and Korea.

When it comes to solving the biggest challenges facing societies and mankind, 40 per cent of the decision-makers in India are certain that genomics is fundamental to developing a precision medicine strategy to treat chronic illness, rare diseases, and lifestyle disorders. Unsurprisingly, 33 per cent of the organisations surveyed across Asia Pacific mirror this drift, followed by 21 per cent who believe genomics can improve the development of drugs and vaccines which is also a priority for 20 per cent of organisations in India. 

In the entire context of genomics data, cyber threats are a key challenge for only 3 per cent of the organisations in India, while more than 80 per cent feel strongly about their cybersecurity strategy indicating it as the lowest amongst the hurdles.