NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Seven Bridges announced today that it has signed a collaborative research and development agreement with the US Department of Veteran Affairs to develop a hybrid cloud for genome data analysis and a genotype-phenotype graph-analysis engine for the VA's Million Veteran Program (MVP).
The MVP was established to study the link between genes and disease using a voluntary research cohort of more than 450,000 veteran enrollees. As part of President Barack Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative, the program is being expanded to include active duty military.
According to Seven Bridges, it has signed on to develop for the MVP an automated execution framework to distribute data and metadata, as well as compute jobs, across on-premise and remote resources, on the basis of access permissions, resource availability, and specific datasets involved.
“Some MVP data will always need to be on local infrastructure, while some can be processed remotely for faster and more cost-effective analysis," VA Program Manager Jennifer Moser said in a statement. "Seven Bridges is building the software to link these two environments so that researchers can ask biological questions and perform reproducible and shareable analysis as rapidly as possible."
Also as part of the CRADA, Seven Bridges will provide MVP with software and algorithms to synthesize existing genomic data sources and phenotype information into a unified graph data structure.
"With this engine, we're expanding on the expertise we built with the UK's 100,000 Genomes Project, with a cohort that will grow to an order of magnitude larger," Seven Bridges President James Sietstra added in the statement. "To work with data this large, new analysis structures like our graph-based suite of tools are needed. We are thrilled to have been chosen for this important initiative, and look forward to collaborating with the VA to develop better and faster ways to process, analyze and learn from the wealth of genomic data being collected from participating veterans."