Children's Cancer Institute customer story | Equinix customer story
When curing childhood cancer becomes a data science challenge
Children's Cancer Institute is Australia's only independent medical research institute wholly dedicated to childhood cancer, based in Sydney and founded in 1976. With around 300,000 children diagnosed with cancer globally each year, and three children dying every week in Australia alone, the Institute took a precision medicine approach that generated enormous volumes of data. Its in-house computing system couldn't scale to meet that challenge. Using Equinix Fabric, the Institute built a direct, secure connection to its cloud providers and research collaborators worldwide, allowing it to compare and integrate data with centers in Philadelphia, Memphis and Heidelberg.
We really believe that this opportunity to partner with Equinix and their global network of data centers will allow us to integrate our data from Australian patients with data that exists overseas, and ultimately overcome pediatric cancer for good.
Mark Cowley Group Leader, Computational Biology, Children's Cancer Institute
A direct line into global research
Children's Cancer Institute took a precision medicine approach to childhood cancer, measuring as much information as possible about each case. That approach inherently generated an enormous amount of data, making the work as much a data science challenge as a biological one. Every childhood cancer is different, and treatments developed for adults simply don't translate, so understanding each case at that level of detail became essential to improving outcomes.
Equinix Fabric gave the Institute a direct, secure connection into its cloud providers and a way to connect globally with collaborators, without the carrier costs usually involved in setting up that kind of connection. That meant data generated in-house in Sydney could be compared directly with data from Philadelphia, Memphis and Heidelberg, all within the same cloud environment.
When a cure depends on comparing notes worldwide
New discoveries at Children's Cancer Institute were always pursued in collaboration with other research centers around the world, since larger, more open clinical trials meant more children could take part. But the Institute's in-house high-performance computing system didn't scale well to the terabyte-level data challenge that kind of collaboration demanded. By bringing data from Sydney and its international collaborators into the same cloud environment, the Institute gained the ability to compare findings across borders and start identifying patterns that wouldn't be visible from any single dataset alone. Equinix Fabric enables organizations to establish private, direct connections between multiple cloud providers and partner networks, avoiding the cost and delay of building that connectivity through traditional carrier circuits.
Equinix allows us to have a direct, secure connection into our cloud providers and fundamentally connect globally to our collaborators, so we can take data we're generating in-house and compare it to data generated at Philadelphia or Memphis or Heidelberg.
Emilio Caspanello ICT Manager, Children's Cancer Institute
Working toward curing every child
The partnership gave Children's Cancer Institute a way to integrate Australian patient data with research from overseas collaborators, without the cost of building that connectivity independently. That global integration supported the Institute's work toward its stated goal, understanding and ultimately overcoming pediatric cancer for every child affected by it.
