Meeting the NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) policy requirements with community-focused cloud platforms
The Velsera suite of NIH-funded platforms including Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC), BioData Catalyst Powered by Seven Bridges (BDC-Seven Bridges) and CAVATICA provide secure, interoperable and scalable biomedical data analysis solutions for governments, universities, institutions, and research consortia. The platforms enable a shared research environment that empower the users to bring together data management, custom analytics, and computation to support collaborative investigation of the causes of health and disease. Velsera has been actively involved in GA4GH to develop and adopt global interoperability standards for data and computation. This interoperability has benefited researchers in multiple ways, including enabling analysis of hypothesis across datasets from up to five different institutes today.
The recent NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) policy announcement emphasizes the importance of rapid data sharing coupled with responsible data management in order to make the results of NIH-funded research easily available to the community. The Velsera platforms can already import from and provide access to several data repositories which are approved by the DMS, such as the NCI CRDC CDS, NCBI SRA, NCBI dbGaP, Kids First, and NHLBI BioData Catalyst® (BDC). This existing secure and scalable connectivity is crucial to achieve the goals of the new DMS policy as it provides access to tools for management and annotation of data, as well as metadata. The Velsera platforms enable users to leverage these unique set of features for reproducible team science:
- Access to NIH-approved secure cloud native data storage infrastructure with access management tools and support from Velsera experts to submit to approved data repositories;
- Rich data exploration and interactive analysis environments with powerful tools such as R, SAS, and Jupyter notebooks;
- Growing library of more than 800 reusable and scalable workflows written in CWL, Nextflow, and WDL backed by comprehensive documentation and 24-hour user support;
- Ability to collaborate within and across organizations to empower reproducible analyses across consortia, using precise project permissions, analysis version control, and provenance of submitted data.
- NIH Researcher Auth Service (RAS) and eRA Commons provides the ability to access dbGaP controlled datasets.
The interoperability standards available on our platforms empower users to analyze publicly available (both open and controlled) and private data together, and to publish results to NIH-approved data repositories. This flow enables novel and cost-effective paths to share data and research findings inside a single and secure ecosystem. To learn more and utilize our data analysis platforms for your data management and sharing needs, we encourage you to contact us at support@sevenbridges.com.
