Guildford, UK, and Burlington, Mass. – IDBS, a global provider of innovative data management, analytics and modeling solutions, today announced the availability of The Biomolecular Hub, a comprehensive data management solution for Omics data and analysis results. The Biomolecular Hub enables researchers to manage the large volumes of Omic data inside and outside their organization, giving unprecedented views of their Omic research data landscape to streamline molecular analysis and improve genomic collaboration.

Research laboratories are generating molecular data in rapidly increasing volumes, especially from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) systems, but also from existing array Comparative Genomic Hybridization (CGH), gene expression and proteomics approaches, which all require their own data analysis, QC and visualization. Raw data and analysis results from these studies are often not associated with each other and are stored in different file systems and databases, hindering searching and sharing, and making it very difficult, if not impossible, to trace or reproduce analysis results. The Biomolecular Hub enables all relevant data and annotations for a particular gene or protein to be quickly and easily found regardless of data format.

The Biomolecular Hub provides bioinformatics organizations with a unique data and result management capability that can easily integrate with existing tools and analysis environments. It indexes metadata from all types of molecular output files, including NGS, gene expression, arrayCGH, Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) and proteomics, to provide a managed file store with unique security, audit and search capabilities. Genomic variant and analysis results are stored and associated with their source files to ensure traceability and reproducibility of results; external data from sites such as the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) can also be preloaded. Importantly it does not require additional copies of data to be generated and stored because it supports analysis of data in-situ. This makes the system highly scalable and ideally suited for high performance computing infrastructures.

“We are seeing a strong demand from our customers for a system to easily manage the flood of genomic metadata and results from molecular analysis. Based on our latest customer engagements, IDBS is providing a groundbreaking solution that links data about molecular files with experimental and derived results,” said Dr. Paul Denny-Gouldson, VP Translational Medicine and Head of IDBS Global Healthcare Unit. “We’re going beyond merely storing raw files to creating a smart system that provides traceability between data and results, and creates a true system for genomic collaboration.”

The Biomolecular Hub is fully hostable, meaning it can hold data files and derived results securely off site or be installed on site for additional control. It enables research scientists to:

Support all forms of translational research, pharmacogenomic studies, biomarker based diagnostics and systems biology projects

Organize their research activities into studies, projects, experiments, analyses

Store and manage analysis results that can be queried by their associated metadata and measurements so researchers can easily find relevant data and files

Store and manage Omics metadata and result files in a way that reflects their relationship with associated research activities

Directly associate analysis results with features, e.g., microarray results files and NGS tertiary analysis files that are associated with significant features, including SNP, SNV, CNV (Duplication, Deletion), Insertion (Transposition), and Inversion

Easily integrate molecular data with clinical, sample and image data

Trace back the origin of selected features, down to CEL, CDF, FASTQ, CSFAST, and SAM/BAM files

The Biomolecular Hub is being deployed as part of The Oncology Research Information System (ORIS) project announced by IDBS earlier this year. ORIS is a unique, enterprise translational medicine platform designed at the Integrated Cancer Centre, King’s Health Partners. It will enable researchers to develop targeted, personalized, cancer therapies according to the specific genetic and other characteristics of individual patients. This will improve the likelihood and number of successful treatment outcomes.