Powering Personalized Cancer Care at Scale: How Color Health Achieved 8x Throughput and 50% Cost Savings with Seqera
Read the full case study8x
Scaling of clinical throughput within 2 months
<1$
Per sample processing costs achieved
>80%
Reduction in troubleshooting and number of runs requiring restarts
Aim
Provide customers with actionable information that can be used to manage their personalized cancer risk and tailor their medication use based on their predicted drug metabolism and response.Challenges
- →Scaling on-demand: Delivering results for 42,000+ AllOfUs participants within four months pushed the existing framework beyond its limits.
- →Operational visibility: Poor insight into task status and resource utilization made it difficult to monitor and optimize high-volume pipeline runs.
- →Infrastructure maintenance: Legacy framework couldn’t keep pace with evolving infrastructure, requiring manual upkeep and workarounds.
- →Cost management: As sample volumes and pipeline complexity grew, increasing time was spent on costly customizations that offered limited scalability.
- →Spot instance reliability: Efficiently handling terminations while meeting clinical deadlines was a significant operational challenge.
— Aroon Chande, Staff Bioinformatics Engineer
Solution
Nextflow
Enable scalable, reproducible, and portable clinical bioinformatics pipelines, with modular workflow development and seamless execution across cloud infrastructure.
Seqera
Provide enterprise-grade pipeline orchestration with real-time monitoring, resource visibility, and optimized compute management to control costs and eliminate bottlenecks at scale.
Results
Nextflow and Seqera transformed Color Health's clinical pipeline operations. The team scaled clinical throughput 8x within just two months, while cutting overall costs by over 50% and bringing per-sample processing costs to under $1. Standardizing on Nextflow also drove a dramatic improvement in pipeline reliability, reducing the number of runs requiring restarts or troubleshooting by over 80%. The result is a scalable, cost-efficient clinical operation capable of delivering genomic insights to patients quickly and accurately.
>50%
Opportunity
Population-Scale Genomics
Proven throughput and scalability to support rapid sequencing and return of results for large cohorts, such as the AllOfUs program.
Personalized Cancer Care
Clinical sequencing tests enable personalized care management, improving cancer outcomes at lower cost.
Public Research Contribution
Genetics findings are shared with public resources such as ClinVar and ClinPGx.
About
Color Health owns and operates the only nationwide, oncologist-led Virtual Cancer Clinic, serving employer, union, health plan and public sector populations.
Since their inception, Color has focused on providing accessible, convenient, easy-to-use healthcare services in critical health areas. Today their sole focus is cancer care and delivering on access, speed and direct clinical care to surpass market expectations for better outcomes and lower costs. This includes identifying high-risk patients based on hereditary risk factors, which are analyzed in our advanced, CAP-accredited and CLIA-certified laboratory. Additionally, Color Health has also provided return of results for large population sequencing studies such as WISDOM and AllOfUs.
To learn more, visit https://www.color.com/