Seven Bridges, the industry-leading bioinformatics ecosystem provider, and Scripps Research have been awarded a $7.5M contract to develop a federated data ecosystem for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under a project titled the NIAID Data Ecosystem (NDE). The NDE will be a secure environment to find, access, query and analyze data from select NIAID repositories, knowledge bases and other relevant resources. The NDE is intended to serve as a place to discover and analyze data on a wide range of infectious diseases inclusive of emerging and re-emerging diseases including COVID-19 – with a keen eye towards ensuring scalability and rapid response to future pandemics.
“NIAID has a mandate to advance data-driven immune-mediated and infectious disease research to accelerate the development of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines; this knowledge will provide the foundation to manage ongoing public health threats and quickly launch a research response to newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases,” said William Moss, CEO, Seven Bridges. “It is a great privilege for Seven Bridges and Scripps Research to be selected to develop the NIAID Data Ecosystem, a selection that respects our organizations’ deep expertise and recognizes the long history of collaboration between Seven Bridges and the National Institutes of Health.”
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The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need for public health organizations, healthcare providers and researchers to respond rapidly to new infectious diseases and emerging public health threats, in addition to continuing innovative research on countermeasures against existing diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and others. For researchers to take full advantage of the immense breadth of all the data generated and collected, mechanisms must be in place to make the data widely available and findable so that researchers can evaluate which datasets will be most impactful for their research.
“The NDE will dramatically improve the ability of researchers to discover data that is relevant for their research, efficiently analyze that data with reproducible tools and collaborate with other researchers,” said Laura Hughes, Ph.D., Senior Staff Scientist at Scripps Research. “The Seven Bridges and Scripps teams have developed extensive infrastructure to support data findability and data analysis, and we have a long history of collaborating with NIAID researchers to share, visualize, and analyze infectious disease data.”
As part of the NDE, Seven Bridges and Scripps Research will develop an ecosystem that will enable the researchers to discover public and restricted datasets and perform analyses. With complex, heterogenous assets managed across different NIAID Data Management Centers (DMCs) and data held in various repositories, the discovery portion of the NDE will allow researchers to search across the diverse landscape from a single interface, while preserving control of data storage, security and management with the data owners. This federated approach will facilitate research on a broad range of data discovery and analysis use cases while also offering long-term sustainability for data sharing and analysis.
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In the analysis section of the NDE, researchers will be able to analyze datasets identified in the discovery interface in a secure cloud-based environment using computing resources provided by their institution or by cloud-compute providers. Researchers will be able to integrate datasets from multiple data sources in combined analyses and will be able to augment data provided by DMCs with their own data. The analysis environments will be able to be shared, enabling collaborators to contribute to the analyses in a secure and compliant environment.
“The Seven Bridges and Scripps Research teams provide substantial, complementary experience in building highly usable and scalable research ecosystems,” said Jack DiGiovanna, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and Program Director for Seven Bridges. “Today, over 80% of relevant data is not accessible to the research community. Together we will build a federated data ecosystem that enables NIAID researchers to discover available datasets, search within those data and then seamlessly analyze cohorts of information in a secure, collaborative workspace environment. I’m thrilled to be leading this effort with the goal to empower a diverse research community to collaboratively analyze this valuable data to better understand emerging pathogens, disease progression and therapeutic interventions.”
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