Toronto, Ontario — DNAstack today announced the launch of Workflows, a marketplace for data analysis pipelines.
Workflows makes it easier and safer for scientists to discover and run trusted, high-quality, reproducible computational pipelines for analyzing omics data. The marketplace includes a curated collection of best practices pipelines for processing data from popular sequencing instrument manufacturers, including PacBio, Illumina, and Oxford Nanopore. Workflows integrates with Workbench, a workflow execution manager by DNAstack, unifying the experience of performing omics data analyses across multiple sequencing instruments and cloud computing platforms.
The path to personalized care
Sequencing instruments are generating increasing volumes of genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics data with unprecedented resolution, throughput, cost-efficiency, and accuracy. These optimizations promise to accelerate the pace of discovery and the path to using individualized omics profiling to personalize care.Data from sequencing experiments, which can be hundreds of gigabytes per sample, first need to be processed using computationally intensive software pipelines before they can be used to inform research and clinical practice. Because of variability between manufacturers, instruments, protocols, read lengths, and accuracy, there are many instrument-specific “best practices” pipelines needed to normalize sequencing data into standard outputs, like variant calls (i.e. the set of genetic differences in sequenced individuals).
Introducing Workflows: a marketplace for omics pipelines
Workflows is a marketplace for high quality omics data analysis pipelines, starting with a curated collection of best practices pipelines for processing sequencing data from PacBio, Illumina, and Oxford Nanopore instruments. Pipelines in the marketplace are organized by manufacturer and are annotated with detailed documentation, tags, and environments they have been tested on. Many of the pipelines added to the marketplace have been authored from scratch and tested for reproducibility on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and on premises.
Unifying the data analysis experience across sequencing instruments and clouds
Workflows integrates with Workbench, a workflow execution manager that is part of DNAstack’s Omics AI platform, so that pipelines from the marketplace can easily be run on private data within a customer’s own environment. The combined solution provides a single, unified experience for managing analyses across multiple sequencing instruments and cloud computing platforms.
"The complexity of performing omics data analysis has been a bottleneck to unlocking the full potential of omics data to transform care. Similar to how Google’s Android operating system unifies the end-user experience across different smartphone devices, our vision is to unify the experience of doing omics data analysis across different sequencing platforms and cloud computing environments."
Powered by open standards
Following the company’s commitment to open science and interoperability, DNAstack has authored the pipelines in the platform agnostic Workflow Description Language (WDL) and published them as open source. The pipelines can be run in compliance with standards developed by the GA4GH, the de facto international standards body for genomics and related data, and in adherence with international privacy regulations like PIPEDA, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Built in collaboration with algorithm developers and sequencing manufacturers
To develop and test the pipelines, DNAstack worked directly with award winning algorithm developers, like Sentieon, and sequencing instrument manufacturers, like PacBio.
"We are excited to see PacBio’s data analysis pipelines available in Workbench. These pipelines follow internationally recognized open standards, making it faster and easier than ever before for our customers to go from data to discovery. DNAstack’s team helped us confirm our product would meet the needs of customers and live up to the vision of WDL standards."
Get started with Workflows
Workflows is a free online marketplace for omics analysis pipelines that is available starting today. Visit omics.ai to browse pipelines and request access to Workbench. Most pipelines are free to run. Sentieon pipelines require purchase of a third-party license. Contact info@dnastack.com for questions, support, and partnership opportunities.
About DNAstack
DNAstack is a Canadian company whose mission is to save and improve lives by unlocking the collective power of the world’s genomics and health data. Omics AI is a software suite by DNAstack that enables privacy-preserving federated insights across distributed data. DNAstack is a global leader in the development of open, interoperable standards as part of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH).
