The San Diego-based company Edico Genome has joined forces with Victorian Clinical Genetics Services (VCGS) in Melbourne, Australia, with the aim of reducing the turnaround time of pediatric genomic testing from months to days. VCGS has deployed Edico’s Dragen Bio-IT platform as part of the Acute Care Genomics project, which is analyzing genomic data from 250 babies and children in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) and pediatric intensive care units (PICUs) across Australia. Leveraging field-programmable gate array technology, Dragen rapidly accelerates analysis of next-generation sequencing (NGS) data, providing results in as little as 20 minutes. “Diagnosing children and newborns in the NICU and PICU is a race against the clock. While NGS is known to be a rich diagnostic tool, lengthy turnaround times have prevented its use in this setting,” said Pieter van Rooyen, PhD, president and CEO at Edico Genome. “Shrinking NGS analysis times enables potentially life-altering results and corresponding treatments to be received as quickly as possible.”