ZS and Seqera announce a new partnership agreement
The partnership is aimed at boosting research productivity in biotech and healthcare
When it comes to maximizing research productivity, life sciences firms need more than just cutting-edge sequencing and analysis technology—they need to assemble the right talent. The importance of a steady hand with the right knowledge and industry expertise cannot be overstated.
Today, Seqera is delighted to announce a new partnership agreement with ZS, a leading management and technology consulting firm serving the biotech and healthcare industries. With 12,000+ people and 35 locations around the globe, ZS is focused on transforming healthcare by leveraging leading-edge analysis, data, and science to help customers make better business decisions.
About the partnership
The partnership aims to enable life sciences companies to scale their research environments to improve patient outcomes. Effective immediately, ZS will offer a range of services related to Seqera’ technologies, including implementation services for Nextflow, Nextflow pipelines, and Nextflow Tower, as well as education and consulting services. The partnership extends beyond implementation services and addresses a broad set of end-to-end challenges from data arriving from sequencers through to tertiary analysis, LIMs integration, GxP compliance, and clinical trials.
“As organizations scale their analysis capacity to keep pace with new innovations in healthcare, Seqera’s market-leading solutions are becoming essential parts of the biotech architecture,” ZS Discovery Principal Bruce Press said. “Through this partnership, ZS’s experts can help customers take advantage of these and other technologies to increase productivity, reduce costs, improve patient outcomes, and deliver new therapeutics to market more quickly.”
Bringing deep expertise to biotech and healthcare
ZS helps leading biopharmaceutical organizations reengineer information strategies and improve decision-making. Having delivered hundreds of successful projects in areas ranging from oncology to cell & gene therapy treatments to patient-first digital care, ZS is uniquely positioned to help biotech companies take advantage of the latest technologies to boost productivity. ZS was recently named a Leader in the “IDC MarketScape Worldwide Life Science Sales and Marketing Strategic Consulting Services 2023 Vendor Assessment.”
ZS consultants, who include bioinformatics experts with Ph.D. degrees, offer a compelling value proposition through their hands-on skills and practical guidance on everything from pipeline development to cloud integrations to industry best practices. They are exceptionally qualified to help organizations improve end-to-end processes from sample collection to downstream analysis.
Maximizing value from Seqera’ solutions
Seqera provides a variety of solutions for the life sciences sector, including Nextflow—the leading open-source workflow orchestrator that simplifies writing and deploying compute and data-intensive pipelines at scale. Nextflow is downloaded over 120,000 times monthly and is used by thousands of researchers and leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Seqera also maintains MultiQC, an open-source reporting tool, and is the driving force behind nf-core, a community effort to collect a curated set of high-quality analysis pipelines written in Nextflow.
Nextflow Tower, an intuitive, centralized command post that enables collaborative data analysis at scale, is trusted by over 8,000 users, including some of the world’s largest biotech companies. With Tower, users can easily launch, manage, and monitor scalable Nextflow data analysis pipelines and compute environments on-premises or across their choice of cloud providers.
ZS’s global team will offer advisory and implementation services around Nextflow, Tower, and related technologies, helping leading healthcare and biotech providers scale their research environments and achieve higher levels of productivity and cost-efficiency.
According to Press, “Multi-omics plays an increasingly important role in developing next-generation therapies, such as targeted chemotherapy, treatment of genetic disorders and new mRNA-vaccines. We’re excited to work with Seqera to help clients harness innovation and scientific advancements to increase R&D productivity and deliver outsized patient outcomes.”
Evan Floden, CEO of Seqera, observes, “The ZS vision of simplifying and accelerating the process of discovering, developing, and delivering transformational new therapies aligns perfectly with our own. We know from experience that Tower can help organizations improve efficiency and reduce cost. However, like any technology, maximizing value depends on a smooth implementation and being able to integrate with diverse technologies in existing environments. With over 1,200 customers in 70 countries, ZS has a global reach. They bring a unique blend of management, bioinformatics development, and cloud engineering expertise to the table, making them an ideal global partner for Seqera.”
A wide range of high-value services
ZS offers services in areas ranging from digital medicine to clinical development to advisory and implementation services. They are ideally situated to help life sciences companies take advantage of the cutting-edge solutions offered by Seqera, as these companies work to advance clinical trials and apply technologies such as analytics and AI to improve discovery outcomes. Their skilled consultants can help organizations realize maximum value from Tower and related technologies in multiple ways:
- Leveraging portable, modular pipelines. ZS and Seqera can help streamline development for firms running in-house workflows, rationalizing existing pipelines and making them easier to deploy and manage regardless of the underlying workflow technology. They can also help firms leverage best practices pipelines and modules from nf-core and other open-source community efforts and simplify maintenance by introducing new tools and proven DevOps techniques.
- Maximizing value in the cloud. Whether organizations operate on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid cloud environments, ZS can help. Like Seqera, ZS brings extensive cloud technology expertise through partnerships with industry leaders. They can help customers optimize their compute and storage infrastructure, ensure cost transparency, and minimize cloud spending. ZS can help organizations take advantage of technologies such as Fusion file system and Tower resource optimizations that have been shown to reduce costs in the cloud by up to 85%.
- Deploying end-to-end process automation. As sequencing costs plummet and personalized, genetically targeted therapeutics become the norm, organizations must rapidly scale their sequencing and analysis capacity. Doing this efficiently depends on end-to-end automation, from placing samples in sequencers to analyzing QC data to secondary and tertiary analysis. ZS can help firms scale their analysis capacity by integrating technology platforms and leveraging automation, reducing the need for manual intervention.
In today’s hyper-competitive market, having the right team in your corner is essential. The development of precision therapies requires scalable, flexible sequencing and analysis pipelines—areas where Seqera and ZS excel and bring unique and proven capabilities.
To learn more about ZS, Seqera, and what we can do for your organization, join us at BioIT World in Boston on May 16-18, 2023. You can visit the Seqera networking lounge on the show floor and visit ZS at booth 109. Learn more at zs.com and seqera.io.