Seven Bridges
Standardizing Data Access and Analysis for Drug Development

There has been a significant shift in the way genomic data is generated, shared, reused, and analyzed by researchers around the world. Notably, the data generated from next-generation sequencing is increasingly becoming central to the drug development process. As a result, there is an increase in the need for organizations to develop seamless solutions for data management and analysis. Enter Seven Bridges. The company has been central to the development of new standards that make biomedical data access, management, and analysis faster and easier for researchers in academic, biotech, hospital, and pharma labs. Three of the largest genomic projects in the world—U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cloud Resources, the Million Veteran Program, and Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project—benefit from Seven Bridges software solutions and bioinformatics expertise. As the NIH’s only private industry Trusted Partner, Seven Bridges authenticates and authorizes access to one of the world’s largest cancer genomics datasets.

Following are the insights shared by Brandi Davis-Dusenbery, Chief Scientific Officer, Seven Bridges on how the company helps biopharma understand biomedical data to reduce the time and cost for bringing a new drug to market.

What is the core mission for Seven Bridges?

At Seven Bridges, our mission is to assist in the realization of precision medicine by enabling the incorporation of biomedical data throughout the drug development lifecycle. With the ability to collaborate, access, and share next-generation sequencing and phenotypical patient data, researchers are able to accelerate the discovery and drug development processes within their labs and organizations.

Access to secure and compliant cloud services have allowed us to begin bringing the process to the data which mitigates the cost, effort, and risk associated with moving and curating multiple local instances of massive data sets. Ultimately, enabling rapid analysis of millions of genomes and other forms of biomedical data.

Leveraging the Seven Bridges Platform in conjunction with our scientific and bioinformatics services, research entities of all sizes are able to build an analytic environment that is uniquely suited to their needs. By foregoing standard out-of-the-box solutions and build outs of in-house infrastructure, operations are able to scale rapidly and get to valuable findings at an unprecedented rate.

Could you talk about the iteration and accumulation of data that has been a major pain point?

The cost of generating NGS data has dropped dramatically over the past several years. Once a sample is collected from a consented patient, generation of the raw sequence data is relatively cost-effective. However, relevant patient identification, sample collection, and consultation are time-consuming and costly. To address this concern, we are increasingly observing organizations teaming up together as pre-competitive collaborators to enhance research and development efficiency and innovation.

Also, many projects in the public sector have been created to generate significant quantities of high-quality data from patients with specific profiles. For instance, one of the major projects that Seven Bridges has been working on for the past four years is funded by the National Cancer Institute. The goal of this project is to make the data associated with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) more accessible and usable by approved researchers.

Please walk us through your Platform-as-a-Service on the basis of its methodology, features, and benefits involved?

Over the past nine years, we have worked on developing not just the platform but also developing an ecosystem of tools and capabilities. Currently, we are able to store, manage, and connect more genomic data than any other commercial provider. These datasets cross multiple disease states and harmonized data ontologies make data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). Users are able to compare their data to diverse public data and generate new insights while maintaining strict control and access and authorization as required by national data policy.

For organizations that are working on target identification by mining large data sets, there is a high degree of hypothesis iteration. This requires the expertise of multiple individuals, and to this end, Seven Bridges is focused on being able to drive the development of a collaborative ecosystem on the platform. For example, a multitude of researchers—each providing their unique expertise— are likely to work through the analysis of any given project. This type of collaboration on the platform is essential across geographies, functions, organizations, and labs. We also offer a rich API layer that allows the integration with a variety of systems and services from Laboratory Information Management (LIMS) systems to other types of tools, offering a comprehensive view across the drug development journey. Additionally, the platform also features a suite of fully customizable visualization tools for researchers to gain and share insights from data as easily as possible.

Our other offering, the Graph Genome Suite is a set of bioinformatics tools for highly accurate analysis of whole-genome sequencing data that resides on the Seven Bridges Platform. This has been developed on the idea that today, most algorithmic methods represent the genome sequence as a linear data structure composed of an aggregate version of individuals. The concept behind Graph is that new data structures can allow richer representation of genomic variation, thus allowing enhanced accuracy and detection of novel variants.

What are some of the factors that differentiate Seven Bridges from its competition?

Seven Bridges provides the most comprehensive bioinformatics platform. Today, we see multiple providers who offer standard out of the box solutions. When in reality, the flexibility to tailor a solution to meet unique research requirements is what our customers seek most. In addition to the more than 400 pre-built bioinformatics tools based on the GA4GH standard for reproducible workflows (CWL) which Seven Bridges co-founded, we also provide the widest array of workflow editing and creation tools, a proprietary python-based toolkit, an extensive API, and employ the largest team of bioinformaticians in the industry to support our customers’ requirements from drug discovery and clinical trial optimization to basic research across all NGS applications.

Another factor differentiating us from our competition is the work we have done with the community to develop standards around data access, reproducibility, and representation of data. By embracing the community to develop new standards for working with NGS data there is now access to a significant amount of data that otherwise would not have been available. This level of data access, management, and analysis rapidly accelerates the drug development pipeline.

What are the next big steps Seven Bridges would be taking in the future?

Seven Bridges sees data access and analysis continuing to play a key role in the realization of precision medicine. The ability for organizations to gain approvals for drugs across multiple countries by leveraging population-specific sequencing data and portable analysis methods is something of particular excitement to us. We are actively pursuing partnerships with organizations that have similar viewpoints regarding data collaboration and access.