Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 9, 2025

Creation and Maintenance of a Living Biobank - How We Do It
Published on: April 10, 2021
BioBricks.ai: a versioned data registry for life sciences data assets
Yifan Gao1, Zakariyya Mughal2, Jose A Jaramillo-Villegas3,4
1Center for Alternative to Animal Testing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Introduction:
Researchers in biomedicine and public health often spend weeks locating, cleansing, and integrating data from disparate sources before analysis can begin. This redundancy slows discovery and leads to inconsistent pipelines.
Methods:
We created BioBricks.ai, an open, centralized repository that packages public biological and chemical datasets as modular "bricks." Each brick is a Data Version Control (DVC) Git repository containing an extract‑transform‑load (ETL) pipeline. A package‑manager-like interface handles installation, dependency resolution, and updates, while data are delivered through a unified backend (https://biobricks.ai).
Results:
The current release provides >90 curated datasets spanning genomics, proteomics, cheminformatics, and epidemiology. Bricks can be combined programmatically to build composite resources; benchmark use‑cases show that assembling multi‑dataset analytic cohorts is reduced from days to minutes compared with bespoke scripts.
Discussion:
BioBricks.ai accelerates data access, promotes reproducible workflows, and lowers the barrier for integrating heterogeneous public datasets. By treating data as version‑controlled software, the platform encourages community contributions and reduces redundant engineering effort. Continued expansion of brick coverage and automated provenance tracking will further enhance FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data practices across the life‑science community.
Related Concept Videos
Issues And Trends In Healthcare Delivery System
Cost Containment
Payment for healthcare services has historically promoted adoption of costly and often unnecessary or inefficient...
Synthetic Biology
Golden rice
Golden rice is a genetically modified...
Biostatistics: Overview
Discrete variables are...
Statistical Software for Data Analysis and Clinical Trials
Bioremediation
Overview of Biostatistics in Health Sciences

