NIH announces access to data for heart, lung, blood, and sleep researchers
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) BioData Catalyst recently announced that its ecosystem, which has undergone rigorous pilot testing, is now open to all researchers. The BioData Catalyst ecosystem provides heart, lung, blood, and sleep researchers with high-value NHLBI datasets in the cloud, streamlining access to the data.
RENCI researchers contribute to BioData Catalyst efforts involving data harmonization and semantic search; image data management, viewing and analysis; and machine / deep learning and AI functionality. Along with partner RTI International, RENCI leads the BioData Catalyst Coordinating Center, which manages and coordinates the diverse BioData Catalyst Consortium teams and stakeholders in order to collaboratively develop novel functionality that will fundamentally change the data and computational resources available to advance NHLBI research and support the NHLBI Strategic Vision.
NHLBI, part of the National Institutes of Health, began building the BioData Catalyst ecosystem in 2018 to enable investigators to take advantage of the vast amounts of data generated by the research it supports across the country and around the world. These data offer the opportunity to provide new insights into the causes and treatment of heart, lung, blood, and sleep (HLBS) disorders - but only if they are efficiently organized, analyzed, and shared.
The BioData Catalyst ecosystem provides HLBS researchers with high-value NHLBI datasets in the cloud, streamlining access to the data. Currently, researchers can access 3.42 petabytes of data, including NHLBI’s Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine (TOPMed) Freeze 5b and 8 data, the database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) TOPMed-related parent studies, and the PETAL Network Outcomes Related to COVID-19 Treated with Hydroxychloroquine Among Inpatients with Symptomatic Disease (ORCHID) Trial data. Data will continue to be added to the ecosystem on a regular basis.
In addition to access to HLBS datasets, the BioData Catalyst ecosystem offers researchers leading-edge tools for analysis of datasets including genomic pipelines, SAS, R, and Jupyter notebooks, as well as the ability to contribute and import workflows from Dockstore. All of these resources are packaged in secure workspaces that allow researchers to easily share, store, and cross-link their findings while also ensuring patient privacy.
The BioData Catalyst ecosystem is both a technical and people-centric endeavor. While the NHLBI has built a technical platform that allows researchers to use tools and workspaces to accelerate discovery and scientific advancement, moving the work to the cloud can also facilitate reproducibility and increased collaboration among researchers. Researchers utilizing BioData Catalyst are able to easily share workflows and communicate with each other on the forums. Further, the ecosystem’s interoperability efforts mean researchers will be able to connect research done on BioData Catalyst to data systems across the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers interested in learning more about BioData Catalyst can join the community and start exploring and working with resources within the ecosystem today.
The BioData Catalyst ecosystem is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and is a joint effort of the NHLBI and data science experts in academic institutions, research organizations, and industry. The Broad Institute, University of California Santa Cruz, University of Chicago, Harvard Medical School, Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, RTI International, Seven Bridges Genomics, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center are working closely with the NHLBI to develop the ecosystem. To learn more about BioData Catalyst, visit biodatacatalyst.nhlbi.nih.gov.
