Curoverse Announces New Infrastructure Software for Precision Medicine, Genomics and Bioinformatics
Company makes open source software platform available for trial through a public beta.
Boston, MA (PRWEB) April 14, 2015
Curoverse today announced the public beta of cloud and on-premise solutions for organizations and individuals using the new Arvados open source software platform to manage, process, and share genomic and biomedical data.
"The explosion in genomic and biomedical data generated for precision medicine is creating significant new IT infrastructure challenges for research institutions, clinical labs, and pharmaceutical companies," said Alexander Wait Zaranek, PhD, chief scientist at Curoverse. "We built Arvados to provide a modern distributed computing platform that addresses the unique data management and processing requirements of the medical and life sciences industries."
The Arvados project was originally started by a team of scientists and engineers led by Dr. Zaranek at Harvard Medical School to manage the genomic and biomedical data being collected for major research projects such as the Harvard Personal Genome Project. Now an independent open source project, the new Arvados platform is available to research and clinical institutions around the world.
"Biomedical informatics and big data computing infrastructure are essential to developing and delivering precision medicine," said Isaac Kohane, co-director at the Harvard Medical School Center for Biomedical Informatics. "It's now possible to deliver more individually targeted medical care because we're making sense of the molecular data that uniquely describe each patient, but precision medicine requires powerful new software infrastructure such as Arvados to handle the flood of new biomedical data."
Curoverse is supporting Arvados deployments both in the cloud and on-premise in customer data centers. The company is implementing Arvados pilots at major medical and research institutions in the US and Europe including projects at Johns Hopkins University, Harvard Medical School, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
"We're already working with more than 20 petabytes of genomic data and seeing firsthand the incredible challenges involved in processing these massive data sets," said Joshua Randall, senior scientific manager in Human Genetics Informatics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We're now planning the next generation of our bioinformatics infrastructure and are piloting Arvados as a foundation for that new infrastructure."
Intel Corporation is helping to support the on-premise Curoverse pilot program by providing funding for equipment being deployed at several institutions, including the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, a research computing center operated by five of the largest research universities in Massachusetts, under a program sponsored by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.
"Through our work with leading medical and research institutions worldwide, we're witnessing the new computing challenges created by genomics and precision medicine," said Ketan Paranjape, general manager of life sciences at Intel. "We're supporting the Curoverse pilot program because Arvados provides new open source software for managing and processing genomic data that lets organizations take advantage of the unique capabilities of Intel compute, storage, networking and software components to accelerate computations."
In addition to on-premise implementations of Arvados, the company is also making the platform available through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering called Curoverse Cloud. The Curoverse Cloud beta is currently free to use and beta accounts provide 1 terabyte of storage and 100 hours of compute time per month for 6 months. According to the company, larger pilots are also available on request.
With Curoverse Cloud, bioinformaticians can use Arvados without having to install or manage their own system. They can also get access to popular pipelines and public data sets.
"When we published our research on DNA samples collected from the New York subway system, we generated broad interest among researchers around the world," said Christopher Mason, an assistant professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics and in the HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medical College. "We partnered with Curoverse to publicly share our data and analytical tools because Arvados offers a completely open source platform that makes it easy for other researchers to reproduce and extend our work."
The team at Curoverse helped to develop the Arvados platform as a new generation of open source infrastructure software for managing and processing genomic and biomedical data to deliver precision medicine. Arvados has several major capabilities:
- Data management - The data management features help users organize, manage, verify, and track (origin and usage) very large data sets ranging from terabytes to petabytes.
- Data processing - The data processing capabilities make it easy for users to run consistently reproducible complex analytical workflows on elastic computing infrastructure.
- Collaboration - The collaboration functionality provides several mechanisms that make it straightforward to securely share data and analytical pipelines within a lab, between labs, and publicly on the Internet.
These capabilities are designed to accelerate new scientific discovery, make it easier to publish and share scientific work, increase the reliability of clinical testing, and lower the costs of operating large bioinformatics computing systems for developing and delivering precision medicine.
Arvados 1.0 is scheduled to be released in the summer of 2015. The company plans to offer the full commercial release of their on-premise and cloud solutions in the second half of 2015. Curoverse did not announce pricing for the commercial release. Additional information about the beta and pilot programs can be found at curoverse.com. More information about the Arvados open source project can be found at arvados.org.
ABOUT CUROVERSE, INC.
Curoverse is dedicated to developing and commercially supporting open source infrastructure software for genomics and precision medicine. The company is backed by leading venture investors and based in Boston, Massachusetts. More information about the company is available at curoverse.com.
Contact:
Jonathan Sheffi
jonathan(at)curoverse(dot)com
617-500-6568