NEW YORK – A consortium led by health technology company Verily received $4.8 million in funding from the US National Institutes of Health to develop a centralized portal and suite of data analysis tools for use with existing Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) platforms.
The consortium, dubbed the Systems Biology Data Platform Leveraging the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (SysBio) and funded through NIH's Common Fund Venture Program, plans to develop a data analysis platform to enable researchers to reuse and reanalyze currently disconnected datasets to explore the roles of specific genes, molecules, cells, and pathways in tissues involved in various diseases.
In particular, SysBio's platform, called the SysBio FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) PLatform for EXploration of Systems Biology (FAIRplex) will integrate phenotypic, clinical, molecular, and patient reported outcomes data collected through the various AMP programs.
AMP, a public-private partnership that seeks to improve the development of new diagnostics and treatments for chronic diseases, maintains datasets covering a range of diseases and tissues, but these are currently siloed in disease-specific platforms, creating the need for cross-platform data discovery and integration.
In addition to Verily, the SysBio initiative consists of DataTecnica, Technome, Sage Bionetworks, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
"Through this collaboration, we will provide the infrastructure and tools to make cross-disease research a reality in order to support the development of medical breakthroughs," David Glazer, workbench chief technology officer at Verily, said in a statement. "This effort will also lay the groundwork for integrating data from beyond the AMP programs."