Opening Genomics Data to All

Boon to future research by opening data. 

Cloud-Based Platform Opens Genomics Data to All

By Johns Hopkins University, January 19, 2022

A team co-led by a Johns Hopkins University computer scientist has created a cloud-based platform that grants researchers easy access to one of the world's largest genomics databases.

Known as AnVIL, the platform gives any researcher with an Internet connection access to thousands of analysis tools, patient records, and more than 300,000 genomes. The work is described in "Inverting the Model of Genomics Data Sharing with the NHGRI Genomic Data Science Analysis, Visualization, and Informatics Lab-Space,"  published in the journal Cell Genomics.

"AnVIL is inverting the model of genomics data sharing," says project co-leader Michael Schatz, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of computer science and biology at Johns Hopkins. Instead of having researchers download massive amounts of data from centralized warehouses to their own data centers, "we allow researchers to effortlessly move to the data in the cloud," he says.

AnVIL is currently built on the Google Cloud Platform to enable massive scalability and capacity for users within a robustly established security perimeter authorized for the storage and analysis of controlled access datasets.

From Johns Hopkins University

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Pharma and the Sharing of Data in Drug Discovery

Not quite what I call crowdsourcing, but rather a  means to make it easier to share and fund expensive research efforts.  Ultimately the very expensive genomic research efforts have to be funded too.   Good to see this direction being explored.

Big Pharma Buys into Crowdsourcing for Drug Discovery
By Menaka Wilhelm  in Wired

" .... Part of the problem is simply that drug design is hard. But many researchers point to the systems of paywalls and patents that lock up data, slowing the flow of information. So a nonprofit called the Structural Genomics Consortium is countering with a strategy of extreme openness. They’re partnering with nine pharmaceutical companies and labs at six universities, including Oxford, the University of Toronto, and UNC Chapel Hill. They’re pledging to share everything with each other—drug wish lists, results in open access journals, and experimental samples—hoping to speed up the long, expensive drug design process for tough diseases like Huntington’s. .... "