U.S. Department Of Veteran Affairs Will Collaborate With Seven Bridges To Power Million Veteran Program Research Projects

Seven Bridges Signs Collaborative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with VA to Develop Hybrid Cloud and Genotype-Phenotype Analytical Engine

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seven Bridges, the biomedical data analysis company, today announced that it has signed a Collaborative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) to support two key research initiatives for the VA’s Million Veteran Program (MVP). The MVP is a national, voluntary research program funded by the VA’s Office of Research and Development, with the goal of partnering with Veterans receiving their care from the VA Healthcare System to study how genes affect health. Seven Bridges will serve as an industrial collaborator on the MVP, supporting the development of a hybrid cloud for large-scale data analysis, and a genotype-phenotype graph analysis engine.

“With this engine, we’re expanding on the expertise we built with the United Kingdom’s 100,000 Genomes Project, with a cohort that will grow to an order of magnitude larger”

With the help of one million Veteran volunteers, the MVP is building one of the world’s largest medical databases for research on diseases like diabetes and cancer, and military-related illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. The two current CRADAs, which include Seven Bridges and Lockheed Martin as industrial collaborators, will lay the foundation to address needs described in the White House Precision Medicine Initiative and the National Cancer Moonshot, announced respectively at President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 State of the Union addresses.

The aim of the Hybrid Cloud project outlined in the CRADA is to establish an automated execution framework that has the ability to distribute data, metadata and compute jobs across on-premise and remote resources, on the basis of access permissions, resource availability and specific datasets involved.

“Some MVP data will always need to be on local infrastructure, while some can be processed remotely for faster and more cost-effective analysis,” said Jennifer Moser, Program Manager, at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “Seven Bridges is building the software to link these two environments, so that researchers can ask biological questions and perform reproducible and shareable analysis as rapidly as possible.”

The aim of the Genotype-Phenotype Graph Analysis Engine is to provide software and algorithms to synthesize existing genomic data sources and phenotype information into a unified graph data structure.

“With this engine, we’re expanding on the expertise we built with the United Kingdom’s 100,000 Genomes Project, with a cohort that will grow to an order of magnitude larger,” said James Sietstra, President of Seven Bridges. “To work with data this large, new analysis structures like our graph-based suite of tools are needed. We are thrilled to have been chosen for this important initiative, and look forward to collaborating with the VA to develop better and faster ways to process, analyze and learn from the wealth of genomic data being collected from participating Veterans.”

About Seven Bridges
Seven Bridges is the biomedical data analysis company accelerating breakthroughs in genomics research for cancer, drug development and precision medicine. The scalable, cloud-based Seven Bridges Platform empowers rapid, collaborative analysis of millions of genomes in concert with other forms of biomedical data. Thousands of researchers in government, biotech, pharmaceutical and academic labs use Seven Bridges, including four of the largest genomics projects in the world: U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Genomics Cloud pilot, the Million Veteran Program, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Cavatica project and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. As the NIH’s only commercial Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges authenticates and authorizes access to one of the world’s largest cancer genomics dataset. The company has offices in Cambridge, Mass.; Belgrade; London and San Francisco.