Seven Bridges today announced that the system it was selected to develop as part of the National Cancer Institute’s Cloud pilot program is open to researchers worldwide. The Seven Bridges Cancer Genomics Cloud is the first complete ecosystem to give cancer researchers immediate access to one of the world’s largest genomic datasets — The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) — and the computational resources to analyze it.
According to the company’s press release:

The Seven Bridges pilot makes more than a petabyte of multi-dimensional data available immediately to researchers, who can also add their own data to analyze alongside TCGA. As an NIH Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges can also authenticate and authorize access to controlled data within TCGA to ensure only NIH-approved researchers may use it.

Dr. Tony Kerlavage, Chief of the Cancer Informatics Branch in the Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) at the National Cancer Institute commented:

Next-generation sequencing has opened the door to new breakthroughs in precision medicine, but the massive data volumes involved also present significant storage and computing challenges. Our goal is to democratize access to NCI-generated genomic and related data and to create a cost-effective way to provide an analytical framework to the cancer research community.

Click here to view the full press release.