GalaxyWorks LLC — Department of Health and Human Services STTR Phase I: NHGRI

Description

Project Summary Galactic Core LLC aims to develop a robust, scalable, and managed service for performing enterprise-grade biomedical data analysis. The service will be based on the popular open-source Galaxy application (​https://galaxyproject.org/​), offering unlimited data storage and compute capabilities with an extremely powerful, flexible, and collaborative environment for analyzing data. The service will be run as a set of private environments with dedicated computers being setup and managed for individuals, research groups, or institutions. Data generation assays and analysis tools in the Biomedical Sciences continue to evolve rapidly and fixed 1-click approach to data analysis is very challenging as the analysis must be quickly adapted to new methods and types of data. This landscape requires a proportionally vast and growing amount of capacity for data analysis that can be readily tailored to the domain and integrates with an array of external resources. Galaxy with its accessible web-interface and a worldwide community is uniquely positioned to adapt to this changing landscape as it provides access to andgt;6,500 best-of-breed analysis tools and andgt;100 data types. These numbers are unmatched by any similar solution, yet the rate at which tools and data types are added continues to increase. However, the challenges with setting up, maintaining, and evolving the necessary data analysis environment present an obstacle for biomedical data analysis, particularly for small firms and laboratories. The goal of our STTR Phase I project is to streamline the process of setting up and managing a production-quality instance of Galaxy and deliver it as a scalable, managed, always-on service. As part of this I-Corps program, we will identify customer pains and gains to better stear product development. Our goal for this program is to gain training and experience with customer discovery and business management as we develop this product-market fit. Broad and simple availability of a powerful biomedical data analysis platform would fundamentally improve access to biomedical data analysis capacity and facilitate routine analyses by research labs and institutions, small businesses, as well as mid-sized corporations.Project Narrative The popular Galaxy application (​https://galaxyproject.org/​) is uniquely positioned to address the continuously evolving biomedical data analysis needs because it integrates and provides ready-access to thousands of best-of-breed analysis tools and data types. Galactic Core LLC has set out to offer Galaxy as a fully managed software service that will take data analysis for basic research, precision medicine, and translational medicine mainstream. Participation in the I-Corps program will help identify product-market fit as we develop the product.