Broad collaborates with Pfizer to enable accessible, cloud-based analysis of human gene expression and regulation

The Broad Institute is proud to announce a collaboration with Pfizer Inc. that aims to create a cloud-based environment for storing and analyzing gene expression and gene regulation datasets.

This collaboration builds upon Broad’s decade-long experience providing the genomics community with advanced sequencing services, and expands the Institute’s offering into data services. We believe that the data services offering will allow the scientific community to benefit enormously by the broadened accessibility of our tools, in which we have heavily invested in order to optimize for the cloud.

To achieve this Broad is leveraging FireCloud, our cloud platform for hosting data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) that was funded through the National Cancer Institute’s Cloud Pilots program, and extending it to manage data and run pipelines for RNA sequencing and expression Quantitative Trait Loci (eQTL) analyses, that were developed as part of the Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. Through this, we hope to create an environment where users from around the world can perform scalable analyses on large, integrated transcriptome datasets.

The work we are doing with Pfizer supports Broad’s mission to create and share tools that will help the genomics community move research forward, and have access to world-class systems, data, analysis tools, and computing power. We look forward to expanding the scope of our mission in the years to come.