Seven Bridges Joins CBTTC in International Genomic Cancer Research Effort
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Jonathan Waller
Jun 02, 2020 | From: GenomeWeb.com
NEW YORK — Seven Bridges said on Tuesday that it has joined an international alliance that aims to link genomic cancer datasets from The Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (Kids First DRC), Zero Childhood Cancer (Zero), the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC).
According to Seven Bridges, the partners aim to build a computation infrastructure that will harmonize data from Zero, an Australian initiative using genomics to personalize treatments for pediatric cancers, with the genomic datasets of CBTTC and Kids First DRC. The effort is expected to help improve researchers’ understanding of rare pediatric brain cancer subtypes.
CBTTC, a multi-institute program researching childhood brain cancers, Kids First DRC, and Seven Bridges have been collaborating for a number of years. In late 2018, Kids First DRC launched an open-source research portal for pediatric cancers and structural birth defects that includes DNA and RNA samples from CBTTC. Kids First DRC, which is backed by the National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program, also uses Boston-based Seven Bridges’ Cavatica platform for storing, sharing, and analyzing large volumes of pediatric genomic data.
Seven Bridges noted that Cavatica is being expanded to enable harmonized analyses across geographically separated and jurisdictionally protected data datasets, which will allow Zero and Kids First workflows and analysis tools to be used interchangeably across their respective datasets.
“By connecting pediatric researchers across international borders through the Cavatica platform, we are also breaking down borders between data silos through the use of the global standard Common Workflow Language and the ease of multi-cloud computing,” Seven Bridges CSO Brandi Davis-Dusenbery said in a statement. “This enables our researchers to focus on treatments for kids with rare cancers rather than data challenges.”
The Australian BioCommons and the Australian Research Data Commons will also contribute to the effort.