Press Releases Below

Seven Bridges announces the launch of largest pediatric data resource as a member of the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center

Cambridge, Mass. Sept 10, 2018. Seven Bridges, the leading biomedical data platform and analytics company, today announced the launch of the new Kids First Data Resource Portal with the Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center (DRC) at the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine (D3b) at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The Gabriella Miller Kids First Data Resource Center is a new, collaborative, pediatric research effort with the goal of understanding the genetic causes of, and links between childhood cancer and structural birth defects. As the Kids First Data Resource Center’s chief outward-facing tool, the Data Resource Portal will serve the needs of a diverse group of patients, researchers, and clinicians partnering together to create the largest database of pediatric genomic data and provides the necessary tools and computational resources for analysis and interpretation of these complex data. This information will be used to advance personalized medicine for the detection, therapy, and the management of childhood cancer and structural birth defects.

Researchers are able to use the Seven Bridges CAVATICA platform, which is integrated with the Kids First Data Resource Portal, to access and analyze data from approximately 8,000 DNA and RNA samples from children affected with childhood cancer and structural birth defects and their families, collaboratively and securely in a cloud-based environment, with a total of 30,000 expected to become available over the next few years.

“The Kids First Data Resource Portal not only breaks down data silos between researchers working in different pediatric diseases” said Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D., CEO of Seven Bridges, “the use of global standards like Common Workflow Language and GA4GH APIs also enable these data to be connected with petabytes of other biomedical data to speed discovery and ultimately improve outcomes for kids.”

“A critical aspect of the DRC is the rapid harmonization of data generated at multiple sequencing centers,” said Adam Resnick, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Kids First Data Resource Principal Investigator, “the Seven Bridges team optimized the harmonization workflow to reduce compute costs by more than three-fold and enabled us to rapidly scale to analyze thousands of Whole Genome Sequencing samples. These efficiencies help us do more analyses, faster.”

The Kids First Data Resource Center is led by the Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in partnership with Seven Bridges, CHOP’s Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics (DBHi), Children’s National Medical Center, Ontario Institute of Cancer Research Institute, Center for Data Intensive Science at the University of Chicago, and Oregon Health and Science University.

The DRC is funded through the NIH Common Fund’s Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research Program which was initiated in response to the 2014 Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act. The Kids First program is led by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Cancer Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Additionally, these institutes work in partnership with the Office of the NIH Director and with additional involvement of several other key NIH institutes and centers.

About Seven Bridges

Seven Bridges is the biomedical data analysis company accelerating breakthroughs in genomics research for cancer, drug development, and precision medicine. Thousands of researchers in government, biotech, and academia use Seven Bridges, including leading global pharmaceutical companies and national genomics projects such as the U.S. National Cancer Institute-funded Cancer Genomics Cloud, the Gabriella Miller Kids’ First Data Center, the Million Veteran Program, Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health Data Commons Pilot.

To find out more, contact us at https://www.sevenbridges.com/contact/.

 Pediatric Research Consortia announce CAVATICA Platform for Analyzing Research Data on Pediatric Cancers and Rare Diseases

Collaboration with The Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium, the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, and Seven Bridges is Part of White House Precision Medicine Initiative

PHILADELPHIA, October 17th, 2016 – Today the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium (CBTTC) and the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC) have committed to share their extensive data collection on rare pediatric diseases and pediatric cancer with the broader medical research community through CAVATICA, a cloud-based biomedical data analysis platform created in partnership with Seven Bridges.  CAVATICA, which also launches out of beta today, will enable researchers to collaboratively access, share and rapidly analyze data collected about diseases impacting children, including pediatric cancers, congenital disorders and rare diseases  such as epilepsy and autism. 

By making large volumes of genomic and other types of data from multiple diseases available, within a system researchers can use to share and  analyze it, CAVATICA is answering the Cancer Moonshot’s call to de-silo data and make it more useful to a wide range of researchers, so that faster progress can be made to fight pediatric cancer and other childhood diseases. 

“CAVATICA gives us an unprecedented opportunity to research a number of childhood diseases, ranging from pediatric brain tumors that are the leading cause of disease-related death in children to rare pediatric disorders that get limited attention and resources,”

Adam Resnick, Ph.D., an expert in brain tumors and Director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine  at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

The CBTTC and PNOC collectively represent more than 20 pediatric  hospitals committed to propelling precision medicine forward through real-time  contribution of data to CAVATICA, with the aim of breaking down barriers that inhibit research collaboration and driving discoveries that will lead to faster treatments and cures. CAVATICA marks the first time this data will be available in the cloud, allowing researchers to compare data on pediatric brain tumors to data from other rare diseases and cancers.  Making all this data available to analyze and share in a single environment means that researchers can move beyond simply focusing on one disease and collaboratively analyze data related to a number of rare diseases, cancers, and across ages in order to identify common causes and shared mechanisms that may lead to new or improved treatments.

“With all this data in a single environment for the first time, researchers can analyze it to better understand how these diseases intersect, and make discoveries that they might not have been able to before. In this way, we will speed progress toward identifying their causes and potential treatments,”

Rishi Lulla, M.D., Executive Chair of the Children’s Brain Tumor Tissue Consortium and a pediatric neuro-oncologist at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

“CAVATICA addresses the challenges researchers fighting pediatric diseases face obtaining the data and analysis tools they need to do their work,”

“By applying the experience we’ve gained supporting some of the largest genomics research projects in the world, we hope to help the pediatric research community and the White House’s Cancer Moonshot push forward the boundaries of what’s possible and discover novel treatments for diseases that impact children and their families.”  

Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Ph.D., SVP of Science and Product at Seven Bridges.

“We’ve been piloting CAVATICA during the past several months and the importance of de-siloing data became quickly apparent … CAVATICA represents an opportunity to empower the rare disease researcher to give those children with rare and deadly pediatric diseases a chance to benefit from the data held by researchers around the world.”

Sabine Mueller, M.D., Ph.D. and pediatric neuro-oncologist and research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and co-director of the Pacific Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium (PNOC).

“This is so important for all of us impacted by pediatric cancers and working in the field,” added Mueller. “We know that pediatric cancers are different than adult cancers and that new therapies must be designed specifically for children based on their disease’s own molecular profile.  So CAVATICA, for the first time, is providing the opportunity for cancer researchers to work at the intersection of those very disparate diseases, and to speed the discovery of treatments and cures.”

CAVATICA will interoperate with the Genomic Data Commons and other NIH data repositories, to connect more data than ever before. Seven Bridges and its partners on the CAVATICA consortium call on scientists, patients and their families around the globe to join in the work of accelerating the discovery of treatments for children by joining at cavatica.org/moonshot.