New data resource center will be created with the NIH and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to enable pediatric research across both cancer and structural birth defects datasets for the first time

BOSTON, Mass., and PHILADELPHIA, Penn., August 15, 2017 –  Seven Bridges, the biomedical data analysis company, today announced that it has been selected to build a new data center in partnership with the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D³b) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a consortium of academic research institutions.  This effort is funded by an award from the National Institute of Health Common Fund’s Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program (Kids First) and will establish the Kids First Data Resource Center.  The Kids First Data Resource Center will bring together harmonized, large-scale, pediatric cancer and structural birth defects data and provide researchers with access to multiple disease datasets in one location — a first for the pediatric community.

Medical research into treatments for rare pediatric diseases, including structural birth defects, lacks the centralized patient-data resources needed to fuel statistically-empowered discovery.  The Kids First Data Resource Center will tackle this challenge by de-siloing pediatric datasets and providing pediatric researchers with access to clinical and genomic sequence data across childhood cancer and structural birth defect patients and their families. It will include an estimated 33,000 new pediatric whole genome sequences by 2022 along with the tools and computational resources needed to analyze the accompanying data.

The ability to analyze cross-disease data in a single, accessible, cloud-based platform will help researchers identify and understand the genetic basis underlying childhood cancers and structural birth defects and develop new, more targeted therapies to treat them. Researchers will also be able to perform comparative analyses at higher statistical power, letting them discover disease-associated genetic alterations to improve diagnostic and prognostic accuracy.

“We are experiencing exponential genomic data growth but this data will only be valuable if it is accessible to researchers,” said Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D, CEO of Seven Bridges. “The Kids First Data Resource Center will not only bring wide-ranging data together in one place, but also give researchers the tools they need to analyze it, helping them to identify new intersections between and treatments for crippling childhood diseases.”

The Kids First Data Resource Center will be developed using the infrastructure from the already successfully deployed CAVATICA platform, which Seven Bridges built in partnership with The Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium and recently won the Bio-IT World People’s Choice Best-in-Show award.  The project team includes experts from D³b, Seven Bridges, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the University of Chicago, Children’s National Health System and the Oregon Health and Science University.

“Harmonizing data so it is easily searchable in a single environment is vital for medical discovery,” said Adam Resnick, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “We have seen first hand with CAVATICA what a difference having access to smart, actionable data makes. Seven Bridges is the ideal partner to work with to build an ecosystem that houses new data, tools, and technologies, answering the Cancer Moonshot’s call to de-silo data and make it more impactful.”

The full Kids First award is expected to provide funding for five years, up to total of approximately $14.8 million contingent on available funds. Within the NIH, the Kids First program is primarily led by four Institutes and Centers (ICs) including NICHD, NCI, NHGRI, NHLBI, in partnership with the Office of the NIH Director and with the additional involvement of several other Institutes and Centers.

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About the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program (Kids First)

Kids First was established in April 2014, less than six months after 10-year-old Gabriella Miller, an advocate for childhood cancer research, died from an inoperable brain tumor. Her efforts to raise awareness of childhood cancer raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for children’s cancer charities and launched Smashing Walnuts, a foundation dedicated to childhood brain cancer research. Because of these efforts, The Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act was passed by Congress to direct funding into the NIH Common Fund over a 10-year period in support of pediatric research.

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 four of the largest genomics projects in the world: U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genomics Cloud pilot, the Million Veteran Program, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Cavatica project and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. As the NIH’s only commercial Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges authenticates and authorizes access to one of the world’s largest cancer genomics dataset. The company has offices in Cambridge, Mass.; Belgrade; London and San Francisco.

About the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

The Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D³b) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia was created in January of 2016 as a transformative healthcare discovery ecosystem to provide personalized care for children through collaborative, data-driven science.  D³b’s multi-disciplinary team brings together experts in the fields of basic science, precision medicine, bioinformatics and genomic research to de-silo research efforts and empower rare disease data throughout the scientific community. To learn more about The Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine, visit https://d3b.center/.

Contacts

media@sevenbridges.com