Biofy combats antibiotic resistance with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Authored by Julien Lehman, product marketing manager at Oracle, and Kellsey Ruppel, principal product marketing director at Oracle.

The authors want to thank Paulo Perez, CEO at Biofy, for his contributions.

Figure 1:  Biofy combines biotech and AI to analyze genetic data and offer personalized therapies for patients.

The rise of antibiotic resistance has become a pressing issue in healthcare, challenging the effectiveness of traditional treatments and leading to increased mortality rates. In Brazil alone, bacterial infections are a significant cause of hospital deaths, often because of delayed diagnosis. Biofy Technologies, a biotech company specializing in innovative genetic analysis, recognized the urgent need to address this problem with cutting-edge technology. By partnering with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Biofy developed a groundbreaking platform that reduces diagnostic time for antibiotic resistance from five days to less than four hours.

Goals for cloud migration

Biofy faced challenges with traditional on-premises infrastructure, which lacked the scalability and computational power necessary for handling the massive datasets required for advanced DNA sequencing. Their goal was to migrate to a cloud solution with the following capabilities:

• Enable rapid and scalable analysis of genetic data.
• Reduce operational costs while improving performance.
• Democratize advanced DNA sequencing for hospitals and laboratories worldwide.

 

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has been a game changer for us at Biofy,” said Paulo Perez, CEO at Biofy, “By leveraging OCI's managed PostgreSQL and generative AI services, we reduced the time needed to identify bacterial infections from five days to just a few hours.”

Suite of Oracle products used

OCI includes all the services needed to migrate, build, and run IT in the cloud, from existing enterprise workloads to new cloud native applications and data platforms. Biofy used the following OCI services and technologies:

• OCI Database with PostgreSQL: High-speed data storage and analysis for large datasets
• OCI Generative AI: Powered by high performance GPUs and Llama large language models (LLMs), enabling advanced pattern recognition in DNA sequences
• OCI Search with OpenSearch: Provides seamless search capabilities for genomic data
• OCI Compute and Cache: Rapid processing and reduced latency

Biofy’s solution on OCI

Biofy developed the Abby Recommender, a platform that integrates Nanopore MinION sequencing technology with OCI. The platform identifies bacterial infections and determines resistance profiles within hours. Using OCI’s AI tools, the Abby Recommender provides personalized treatment recommendations for healthcare professionals.

Migration path

The transition to OCI involved the following steps:

• Assessment and planning: Evaluating Biofy’s existing infrastructure and identifying key areas for optimization.
• Implementation: Deploying OCI Database with PostgreSQL for high-speed data handling and generative AI for real-time analytics.
• Optimization: Collaborating with Oracle’s technical team to fine-tune performance and cost-efficiency.

 

“We consider Oracle a true partner by providing local technical support to help us optimize OCI’s fully managed generative AI and open source database services for advanced DNA sequencing with better performance and cost-efficiency," said Paulo Perez.

Figure 2: Biofy’s architecture deployment

Results

Biofy experienced the following results from the OCI implementation:

• Reduced diagnostic time from five days to under four hours.
• Achieved 50% better performance at up to half the cost of competitors.
• Enabled scalability for serving more hospitals and labs.
• Saved an estimated 2,000 lives in a single year by accelerating accurate diagnoses.

Next steps

Biofy plans to implement the following extensions:

• Expand the Abby Recommender platform to more hospitals and laboratories worldwide.
• Utilize more OCI services, including advanced data science tools, to enhance diagnostic capabilities.
• Continue collaborating with Oracle to explore new AI-driven healthcare solutions.

 

To learn more about Oracle’s solutions, see Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.