Droplet Biosciences has reported a reduction in genomic analysis turnaround time for residual cancer detection by adopting graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated workflows using NVIDIA Parabricks software.

The company focuses on detecting remaining cancer after tumour removal, analysing lymphatic fluid collected 24 hours post-surgery. This approach aims to provide clinicians with earlier insights than traditional blood-based tests, improving the timeliness of patient care.

Relying on deep sequencing, Droplet's LymphDetect test previously required days for computational analysis. The adoption of GPU-accelerated software now enables significant time savings.

According to Droplet, variant calling has been reduced from up to 36 hours to under three hours, and sequence alignment now takes less than one hour instead of nearly ten hours. In addition, overall analysis timelines have decreased from ten days to two days.

These advancements are attributed to Nvidia's accelerated computing hardware, including the NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU and NVIDIA L40S. The platforms allow for massive parallelisation for genomics workloads.

Droplet Biosciences' chief scientific officer Wendy Winckler said: “By leveraging NVIDIA Parabricks' acceleration, we've been able to compress some of our most computationally intensive steps from more than a day down to just a few hours.

“That speed matters. It means clinicians can get critical information sooner, make decisions at a more impactful moment, and ultimately deliver better, more personalised care for patients.”

Droplet Biosciences CEO Greg Gosch said: “We're very proud of our informatics team, led by Zhuosheng Gu, for continuing to advance our data processing capabilities.

"We serve a unique segment of the cancer detection market where speed-to-result is particularly important for treatment decisions. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Nvidia to optimise and implement Parabricks technology into our cancer testing pipeline.”