Switzerland-based Sophia Genetics has expanded its collaboration with Città della Salute e della Scienza di Torino, a health centre in Italy, by extending the use of its SOPHiA DDM Platform on Microsoft Azure.

This health facility, part of one of Europe's largest university hospitals, initially adopted SOPHiA GENETICS in 2021 to enhance workflows and support research in various medical areas.

The expanded partnership will focus on utilising the SOPHiA DDM Platform to investigate homologous recombination repair biomarkers associated with ovarian, prostate, breast, and pancreatic cancers.

This cloud-based platform, powered by Microsoft Azure, leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyse large and complex next-generation sequencing (NGS) data.

According to the vendor’s website, SOPHiA DDM is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed for scalability, to facilitate the adoption of data-driven medicine.

Utilising AI, the platform is claimed to analyse diverse digital health data and generate insights in areas including oncology, with accuracy in handling complex modalities such as genomics.

Key features include its modular architecture, which is based on deep user domain modelling.

SOPHiA GENETICS aims to contribute to the democratisation of data-driven medicine by leveraging Microsoft Azure's secure, cloud-based infrastructure to facilitate data-sharing and research collaboration.

Città della Salute e della Scienza di Torino medical genetics unit head Dr Barbara Pasini said: “The ability to partner with a technology provider that can help efficiently decipher the expansive amount of data from raw NGS data – and guarantee the security of such data – is of paramount importance to our institution.

“The SOPHiA DDM Platform, which leverages the cloud infrastructure of Microsoft Azure, answers our needs by providing the secure analysis of all data coupled with simplified insights.”