Seven Bridges Leads Public-Private Partnership To Develop New Data Ecosystem For NIH

By Bio-IT World Staff

November 6, 2017 | Seven Bridges today announced that it has been selected by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase. As the only corporate service provider leading a pilot, Seven Bridges will build upon its expertise delivering the NCI Cancer Genomics Cloud to advance NIH’s vision for a virtual biomedical data discovery and computing environment employing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data sharing principles. The Data Commons Pilot Phase is NIH’s latest effort to accelerate biomedical research through informatics.

Seven Bridges will lead a team consisting of Repositive, Elsevier, and the Boston Veterans Affair Research Institute. Together, they are forming a private-public consortium called FAIR4CURES.

“The NIH Data Commons promises to transform the way public biomedical data is stored and analyzed,” Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, CEO, Seven Bridges, said in a press release. “An effort of this scale has never been tried before and its focus on interoperable data accessibility answers the call to break open data siloes, setting new standards for healthcare research.”

The FAIR4CURES team will work within the overall Data Commons pilot to build a full-stack solution that unifies data from a variety of research environments into a single ecosystem that advances data discovery, access, and computation. Seven Bridges will lead the overall project using its existing cloud infrastructure for biomedical data analysis, which includes AWS, Google, and local compute storage solutions, and continue building interoperability standards, such as Common Workflow Language, to accelerate collaborative research and open source development.

The company will also create interoperable APIs to connect biomedical data from the Cancer Genomics Cloud and Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Center to additional NIH datasets such as the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed), Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx), and the Model Organism Databases (MODs) datasets.  Other members of the FAIR4CURES consortium will contribute access to petabytes of additional data, including more than one million indexed datasets from the Repositive Platform, Elsevier’s Mendeley data hub, and the VA’s GenHub Ecosystem.