February 16, 2016 — CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — 16 February 2016 — Seven Bridges, the biomedical data analysis company, today announced that the system it was selected to develop as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Cloud pilot program is open to researchers worldwide. The Seven Bridges Cancer Genomics Cloud is the first complete ecosystem to give cancer researchers immediate access to one of the world’s largest genomic datasets — The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) — and the computational resources to analyze it.

More than a petabyte of data from more than 11,000 patients representing 33 cancer types are made available in The Cancer Genome Atlas.

“Next-generation sequencing has opened the door to new breakthroughs in precision medicine, but the massive data volumes involved also present significant storage and computing challenges,” said Dr. Tony Kerlavage, Chief of the Cancer Informatics Branch in the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) at the National Cancer Institute. “Our goal is to democratize access to NCI-generated genomic and related data and to create a cost-effective way to provide an analytical framework to the cancer research community.”

“The ability to analyze TCGA data in the cloud is opening a world of new research opportunities for my lab’s work on breast cancer and for cancer researchers everywhere,” said Jeffrey Chuang, Associate Professor of Computational Biology at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. “Previously, we would have needed to wait months just to get the data, but now we can start asking and answering questions immediately. In addition, the cloud makes it possible to try vastly more approaches than we could have before.”

The Seven Bridges pilot makes more than a petabyte of multi-dimensional data available immediately to researchers, who can also add their own data to analyze alongside TCGA. As an NIH Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges can also authenticate and authorize access to controlled data within TCGA to ensure only NIH-approved researchers may use it.

“As the only commercial partner participating in this NCI initiative, our objective is to ensure that the wealth of available TCGA data is actually useful to researchers by providing tools and workflows that enable immediate analysis,” said James Sietstra, President of Seven Bridges. “The Seven Bridges Platform supports an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to cancer research, empowering multiple stakeholders to collaborate and participate in large-scale genomic data analysis, regardless of their site or resource constraints. We are honored to take part in this vital NCI initiative.”

This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, under Contract No. HHSN261201400008C.

About Seven Bridges

Seven Bridges is the biomedical data analysis company accelerating breakthroughs in genomics research for cancer, drug development and precision medicine. The scalable, cloud-based Seven Bridges Platform empowers rapid, collaborative analysis of millions of genomes in concert with other forms of biomedical data. Thousands of researchers in government, biotech, pharmaceutical and academic labs use Seven Bridges, including two of the largest genomics projects in the world: U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genomics Cloud pilot and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. As the NIH’s only commercial Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges authenticates and authorizes access to the world’s largest cancer genomics dataset. The company has offices in Cambridge, Mass.; Belgrade; London and San Francisco.

 

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