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Seven Bridges provides a complete bioinformatics ecosystem, helping researchers extract meaningful insights from genomic and phenotypic data and accelerating their ability to deliver novel therapies to patients. As a result, customers can leverage massive multiomic datasets, for seamless integrated exploratory analysis and high-volume processing, to enhance their hypothesis resolution processes, isolate critical biomarkers, turn failing clinical trials around, and explore other ways to create value.
GEN sat down with Bill Moss, CEO, and Brandi Davis- Dusenbery, PhD, CSO, of Seven Bridges to discuss how a bioinformatics ecosystem can enable researchers to push the boundaries of science by unmasking the genomic insights hidden inside the vast amounts of raw sequence data.
GEN: At Seven Bridges, your corporate vision is to revolutionize the discovery, development, and commercialization of novel precision medicines and therapies. How are you accomplishing this?
Bill Moss: Seven Bridges optimizes bioinformatic and scientific methods used to engineer novel precision medicines and therapies to significantly decrease the time, cost, and risk in the discovery-through-commercialization cycle. We have demonstrated our ability to increase the productivity of biotech and pharma R&D organizations and to formulate and refine high-potential hypotheses, productization of findings, identification of high-impact patient populations, and the successful completion of clinical trials. We accomplish this by:
- Empowering researchers to seamlessly access, combine, and manipulate the most comprehensive data and powerful analytic tool sets available, while maintaining the highest standards of data security and quality control;
- Achieving maximum efficiency in discovery by accelerating iterative exploratory R&D analyses, driven by complex, custom multiomic bioinformatics;
- Integrating biopharma R&D ecosystems within and across multiple communities, for optimal collaboration; and
- Augmenting bioinformatics throughput and capabilities with world-leading R&D program management and scientific and bioinformatic professional services.
GEN: How do your products and services differ from other bioinformatics solution providers?
Bill Moss: Our longstanding commitment to actively pursue scientific excellence and optimize collaborative R&D separate us from the pack.
While maximizing processing speeds and minimizing storage requirements are always mission-critical aspects of our solutions, optimizing the science for the most
collaborative, informed, accurate, and complete results is the key to converging on and commercializing more meaningful discoveries at a faster rate. We accomplish this in four solution categories, forming a comprehensive bioinformatics ecosystem: The Seven Bridges Platform; Scientific and Bioinformatic Professional Services; Transformative
Algorithmic and Data Analytic Solutions; and seamless access to Intelligently Curated Content. While clients may choose to engage in only one or a combination of these categories, together they provide transformative results and exceptional return on investment.
The Seven Bridges Platform is the foundation for this highly collaborative ecosystem. It enables targeted, data-driven insights through complex custom bioinformatics in an iterative exploratory R&D setting. This combines with our ability to seamlessly automate proven workflows with streamlined interfaces to quickly extend insights across larger populations.
Our Scientific and Bioinformatic Services help clients to jumpstart new initiatives, augment their capabilities, and expand analytical throughput. Our Transformative Analytic Solutions, such as our Directed Acyclic Graph and Integrative Data Exploration & Analysis offerings, transform bioinformatics, enabling rapid definition of population-specific enhanced references, optimizing cohort stratification, and transforming identification of breakthrough genotypic-phenotypic relationships.
As the only commercial entity with NIH Trusted Partner status and the underlying provider for world-leading public and national genomic programs, we have a proven history of democratizing access to a wide array of data, tools, and algorithms, with multicloud (public, private, or hybrid) processing of disparate datasets in their source locations.
GEN: Please provide more detail around the various components of the Seven Bridges bioinformatics ecosystem.
Brandi Davis-Dusenbery: Seven Bridges offers the only multicloud genomic analytic platform available, and it allows our customers to seamlessly and securely analyze data across diverse geopolitical regions. With datasets spanning multiple disease states and harmonized data ontologies making data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), users can compare their findings to diverse public data and generate new insights while maintaining strict control, access, and authorization as required by national data policy.
Within our secure analytic platform, we offer more than 400 prebuilt tools and workflows based on the Common Workflow Language (CWL), including licensable, open source, and proprietary tools. Researchers can also create and edit workflows through our award-winning graphical user interface, RABIX Composer desktop visual workflow editor, or in the text editor. An extensive Application Programming Interface (API) allows full integration with upstream and downstream systems, automates batch processing of large sample volumes, and provides access for advanced users.
Introduced earlier this year, the Seven Bridges Automation Suite offers end users the ability to start complex analysis workflows at the push of a button, eliminating the need to manually create projects, import files, set metadata, set up apps, or export results. The Seven Bridges Automation Development Kit, offers expert users the option to reduce the number of lines of code by 80%, covering concurrency, dependency management, memoization, retries, execution logs, and much more.
Our on-demand professional and consultative services are customized to meet our clients’ objectives. With an expansive team of biologists, geneticists, statisticians, bioinformatics scientists, and engineers, we can assist with everything from drug discovery and clinical trial optimization to basic research—across all next-generation sequencing (NGS) applications.
GEN: Nature Genetics published a paper on your work surrounding pan-genome graphs. What were a few of the key components of the publication?
Brandi Davis-Dusenbery: In this paper, (Rakocevic, G, et al. Fast and accurate genomic analyses using genome graphs. Nature Genetics, 2019; 51: 354–362), we presented our next-generation whole genome sequencing (WGS) and whole exome sequencing (WES) workflows implementing Genome Graph Reference–based analysis. The graph-based workflows support the use of previous knowledge about population genomes to consistently improve sensitivity without impairing specificity, on a variety of benchmarks (compared to standard WGS methods). These tools can call variants with superior accuracy, without compromising speed or cost. Our implementation uses standard genomic data formats (FASTA, VCF, FASTQ, BAM, BED), ensuring compatibility with existing workflows.
GEN: Seven Bridges was selected as the core informatics supplier for the Vanguard Phase for the UK Biobank Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) initiative. Are there advantages surrounding Seven Bridges that led to this win?
Bill Moss: The UK Biobank WGS initiative is one of the, if not the, largest initiatives of its type requiring a proven scalable platform and a unique set of bioinformatic skills. The Seven Bridges ecosystem provides a proven capability that solves the challenges of complex information and analytic workflows, engineering solutions to process at scale across a multicloud environment, and data management tools to organize the data inflows from sequencing partners and outflows to downstream external services all within a GDPR security framework.
GEN: Looking forward, how will bioinformatics evolve and how does Seven Bridges plan to meet these new needs?
Bill Moss: At Seven Bridges, we believe that accelerating scientific innovation will drive the evolution of bioinformatics in precision medicine. And, increasing the accuracy and completeness of highly targeted custom analytic experiments within the iterative exploratory process will be the key to meaningful discoveries and ensuing breakthroughs. Seven Bridges is transforming the foundational approach to such analyses with our implementation of directed acyclic graphs for genomic analyses, which enables researchers to rapidly enhance the linear reference to remove inherent biases, more completely represent targeted populations, and empower researchers to more aggressively target the specific objective of their experiments. Further, Seven Bridges is actively expanding multiomic analytic capabilities beyond basic cohort selection to truly enable deep scientific insights. In my opinion, such capabilities will set the stage for an impactful application of AI/Machine Learning to further accelerate breakthroughs. Together, these advancements will enable a greater number of precision medicine solutions to be made available to an ever-increasing number of highly targeted patient populations, resulting in transformative advancements in life sciences and a healthier global population.
Visit sevenbridges.com/gen to learn how you can discover like never before with a complete bioinformatics ecosystem.
