NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Broad Institute said today that it will use Appistry to distribute its Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK) platform for use by for-profit companies.
Broad said that Appistry will make the GATK 2.0 platform available to for-profit companies under license agreements and subscription fees that are separate from the free arrangements used by non-profit and academic researchers. The subscription fees will cover commercial-grade support for installation, configuration, and documentation, and long-term support for each new release, Broad said.
All prospective users will be able to use the earlier GATK 1.0 model, now renamed GATK-lite, for free, Broad said.
The GATK, developed by Broad in 2009, is an open-source computational platform for use in the development of analysis tools for next-generation sequencing data, such as methods for identifying variants that may be associated with diseases. It has been used in the National Institutes of Health's 1,000 Genomes Project and the Cancer Genome Atlas, as well as by sequencing and research centers engaged in population and disease studies.
Broad Institute Deputy Director David Altshuler said in a statement that, as an academic institution, it does not have the resources to provide the support that many of the GATK's for-profit users would like.
"By partnering with Appistry, we are able to continue to provide the toolkit for free to non-profit users, and to continue to extend its capabilities, while also ensuring the kind of support that users at for-profit companies have been looking for," Altshuler said.