Building a collaborative cloud platform to accelerate heart, lung, blood, and sleep research

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Data Science
• Computational Biology
• Genomics and Precision Medicine

Background:

• Modern research increasingly requires access to and analysis of large-scale datasets.
• The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) recognized the need for a centralized data resource.
• Existing data platforms lacked comprehensive features for collaborative and large-scale data interrogation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce the NHLBI BioData Catalyst (BDC) as a community-driven ecosystem.
• To describe the BDC's capabilities for data access, sharing, storage, and computation.
• To highlight BDC's role in supporting precision medicine and scientific discovery.

Main Methods:

• Development of a secure, cloud-based ecosystem with user authentication and authorization.
• Integration of search functionalities, tools, workflows, and applications for data analysis.
• Leveraging separately developed platforms to ensure flexibility and cater to diverse researcher needs.

Main Results:

• BDC provides researchers with access to large-scale datasets for heart, lung, blood, and sleep conditions.
• The ecosystem facilitates exploratory data analysis, genomic and imaging studies, and promotes reproducibility.
• BDC enhances interoperability with other NIH data science platforms.

Conclusions:

• The NHLBI BioData Catalyst (BDC) is a vital resource for advancing precision medicine in heart, lung, blood, and sleep research.
• BDC fosters scientific discovery and technological innovation through its comprehensive data and computational services.
• The platform demonstrated its utility by accelerating research during the COVID-19 pandemic.