- Sofia Breschi, B.Sc. student in Biomedical Engineering - Beatrice Branchini, B.Sc. student in Biomedical Engineering In the last few years, the use of Next Generation Sequencing technology in medicine has become more and more common, in particular for the diagnosis of genetic diseases and the production of personalized drugs. In this context, the identification of characteristic patterns in the human genome plays an important role. Exact pattern matching algorithms are an efficient way to identify those sequences. However, this process represents a bottleneck in the genomic field as it is very computationally intensive and time-consuming. Moreover, general-purpose architectures are not optimized to handle the huge amount of data and operations used in a genomics context. Due to these considerations, we propose an implementation of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP) algorithm on FPGA, a particular family of integrated circuits capable of reconfiguration for an infinite number of times. The KMP algorithm results in being very fast and efficient, by reducing unnecessary comparisons of characters that have already been matched. Furthermore, to achieve an overall speedup of the alignment process, the implementation on FPGA will bring on an even faster and more efficient solution, thus providing the patient with a quick response.