Eikon Therapeutics scales explosive data growth with Qumulo
Eikon Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech company advancing breakthrough therapeutics through the purposeful integration of engineering and science. Their team of biology, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology experts analyzes single molecule protein behaviors in living cells, to discover potential new drug therapies. This is done by tracking, measuring, and analyzing protein dynamics to see which drugs may extend or improve patients’ lives when faced with serious illness. In order to perform this data-intensive work, they rely on a robust technology stack that includes Qumulo.
During a recent speaking engagement, Qumulo CEO Bill Richter emphasized, “There are thousands of proteins that play important roles in living organisms, but there’s little known about them.”
As part of the conversation, Patrick McNamara, Director of Engineering Compute at Eikon Therapeutics, explained one of the main elements to their technology stack – live-cell, super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, which was created by co-founder Eric Betzig, PhD and other collaborators. Dr. Betzig won the Nobel Prize in 2014 for his work in
the field.
As the foundation of Eikon’s technology stack, Single Molecule Tracking (SMT) uses fluorescent dye and video to see and measure movements between proteins in a living cell. It is done in great detail—with high resolution video imaging that has fast frame rates, resulting in serious amounts of data
to manage.
Managing unstructured data storage supports business needs
Data touches nearly all aspects of Eikon’s business. “It is what will make us a successful company,” explained McNamara. As the company grows, scales, and performs research to improve biological and chemical pipelines, data generated from their SMT instruments continues to grow at exponential rates. They must keep data both protected and accessible given the serious implications of their research, and with plans to keep evolving its protein-driven drug discovery, Eikon was attracted to Qumulo because of its data protection, scalability, cloud compatibility, and differentiating features.
“I did a fair amount of investigation when we were making our first storage purchase. Knowing our data set, and what we need to do in the future, features like API access, replication, and Qumulo Shift are critical to our data management,” said McNamara.
Eikon’s data set is large in size and file count, which means performing a fair amount of data curation and aging. To easily expand storage by more than an order of magnitude since their initial, small purchase in 2020, McNamara appreciates having little-to-no impact on their operational environment. “We can click a button, come back in a day, and everything is rebalanced. That’s a win in my book,” he added.
Eikon prepares for dynamic, cloud-based data environment
Eikon estimates they will soon be generating nearly a petabyte of data per day.
We do SMB, NFS, and object, and not having to worry about spinning up something that translates our storage array’s way of communication to Linux, Windows or other protocols, makes my life easier and helps our science team access the data they want.
In the next year, Eikon expects to expand data generation and consumption to multiple sites and likely into the cloud as well. Their storage team will remain relatively small so they must rely on dependable, trusted technology partners to help them keep pace. Qumulo is a trusted partner for Eikon, providing simple-to-implement, easy-to-manage storage. And Eikon has a choice to deploy Qumulo’s multi-cloud file data platform when they expand to the cloud, which creates greater partnership value for McNamara, his growing team, and Eikon Therapeutics’ leadership.
Learn more about our key solutions, discover the industries and customers Qumulo supports, and what investments we’re making to support companies as they move their workloads to the cloud.
Eikon Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotech company advancing breakthrough therapeutics through the purposeful integration of engineering and science. They chose Qumulo to scale their multiple petabytes of data.
- Scalability: Eikon appreciates the ability to expand with little-to-no-impact on their operational environment.
- Flexibility: The team expects to expand data generation and consumption to multiple sites and likely into the cloud as well.
- Support: Eikon has been impressed by the Qumulo Customer Success team and how accessible they are via Slack.