Together with Microsoft and DNAnexus, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has launched St. Jude Cloud, a platform that gives researchers access to pediatric cancer genomics data.
The platform lets scientists view over 5,000 whole-genome, 5,000 whole-exome and 1,200 RNA-Seq datasets from more than 5,000 patients and survivors.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
St. Jude Cloud also offers various bioinformatics tools, including data analysis pipelines. Users can also look at data with interactive visualization capabilities powered by ProteinPaint, a genomic visualization engine created at St. Jude.
If researchers want to make use of these tools, they can also safely upload their own data to the cloud.
The information available in St. Jude Cloud is stored on Microsoft Azure, a cloud computing service. DNAnexus, a company that offers cloud-based platforms for research institutions, utilizes Azure to provide a platform that supports Microsoft Genomics service.
The ultimate goal of the new initiative is to make it easier for experts to verify their research and make advancements in understanding the genetic aspects of childhood cancer. By next year, St. Jude plans to make 10,000 whole-genome sequences available on the platform.
“St. Jude Cloud is a powerful resource to drive global research and discovery forward,” Jinghui Zhang, co-leader of the initiative and chair of the St. Jude department of computational biology, said in a news release.”Providing genomic sequencing data to the global research community and making complex computational analysis pipelines easily accessible will lead to progress in eradicating childhood cancer.”
St. Jude’s partners in this endeavor have been in the news as of late.
DNAnexus closed a $58 million financing round led by Foresite Capital. TPG Biotech, WuXi NextCODE, GV (formerly Google Ventures), MidCap Financial and Claremont Creek Ventures participated, and strategic investment came from Microsoft.
As for the Redmond, Washington tech giant, earlier this year it shut down an initiative that produced apps to offer analysis and user analytics based on personal health records from HealthVault. More recently, it filed a lawsuit against Community Health Systems, claiming the hospital operator allowed its divested entities to use Microsoft’s software.
Photo: BackyardProduction, Getty Images
