In the ever-evolving landscape of scientific research, the key to discovery lies in the data. What could you do with over 14 petabytes of multimodal data spanning a million subjects and multiple model organisms?   Welcome to the Velsera Seven Bridges Core Platform, where connectivity, collaboration and analysis meet discovery.   The Seven Bridges Core Platform connects to a vast collection of datasets, allowing researchers to ask novel questions and reduce the time and cost of discovery.  These datasets comprise a spectrum of sequencing strategies (whole genome sequenc ..read more

Contributors: Julie Gil, Ph.D., Sarah Kleinstein, Ph.D., Cera Fisher, Ph.D., Dennis Dean Ph.D., and Kristina Clemens Ph.D. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us gained first-hand experience of the efficacy of mRNA vaccines. Twenty years of dedicated research in the general application of mRNA vaccines fueled the rapid delivery of the specific and extremely effective inoculation for a virulent and incredibly awful new illness (here, your author speaks from personal experience). But vaccine usefulness doesn’t stop at your annual covid and flu shots. Vaccines teach your immune system to recogn ..read more

At Velsera, we’re passionate about paving the way for the future of bioinformatics and regulatory excellence. We collaborated with the BioCompute Object (BCO) community to develop the BCO standard for communicating complex Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) workflows for regulatory review and developed an award-winning app that generates BCOs from complex workflows. The emerging challenge in the world of BBCOs is to demonstrate their interoperability.  BCO tools are rapidly evolving, both within and external to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). We’re excited to take the lead in this ..read more

Limited by computational resources, the Khiabanian lab at Rutgers needed a breakthrough.   The lab was looking at rare changes in blood cells linked to a condition called CHIP (clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential). This condition has been associated with certain types of treatment-induced cancers as well as resistance to cancer treatments. Most people study CHIP by genomic sequencing of whole blood samples. However, the Khiabanian lab believed they might detect these changes in trace blood cells present in tumor tissues. If true, this would allow them to use many existing ..read more

The power – and increasing cost-effectiveness – of ‘omic technologies has provided groundbreaking insights into the underpinnings of biology and has revolutionized the process of target and drug discovery.  A method like transcriptomics can provide a snapshot of genetic activity under certain conditions while proteomics can tell us which of those transcripts are being translated into proteins, providing a more detailed mechanism to understand the functional implications of post-translational modifications. Critically, while each of these methods provides incredible detail about specific l ..read more

I have long been fascinated with data’s power to drive new insights, including developing a deeper understanding of human physiology/pathophysiology, informing decision-making, and guiding the development of new treatment options. Often novel complex analysis methods are linked to specialized visualizations to drive the development and use of these insights. My fascination has grown into a career that aims to decrease the time required to go from data to insight.   I recently presented a webinar titled, Ushering a New Era of Precision Medicine with Muti-Omics, I reviewed several real ..read more

Velsera is deeply committed to enabling precision medicine not only through accelerating discoveries but also through training the next generation of scientists. With the rapid increase of multi-omics data availability and the increasing need for analysis of the publicly available resources, it is of paramount importance that young scientists include this knowledge in their research and learn how to make the most of it.   Many multi-omics and bioinformatics analyses that once were the province of programmers are now indispensable for everyday clinical care. This rapid shift has been ..read more

Title: Unleashing the Power of Multi-Modal Data: Pioneering Precision Medicine in the Digital Age Introduction: In recent years, precision medicine has witnessed remarkable progress, thanks to multi-omics and multi-modal data integration [Review papers].[1] This holds immense potential for advancing healthcare in various domains, such as risk target identification, trial design, diagnostic analytics, population health analysis, lab automation, and clinical decision support [citations].[2] Whether you are part of industry, government, or academia, leveraging multi-omics and multi-modal data can ..read more

This month represented an important step forward in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease with Eli Lilly announcing the successful results of their phase III clinical trials for their monocolonal antibody (mAB) donanemab. In addition to decreasing the overall amyloid burden, patients on the drug showed slowed disease progression and sustained performance on standardized dementia screenings.   This trial and others have given credence to the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease which posits that the accumulation of beta-amyloid protein in the brain is a central contributor to the ..read more

The Velsera suite of NIH-funded platforms including Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC), BioData Catalyst Powered by Seven Bridges (BDC-Seven Bridges) and CAVATICA provide secure, interoperable and scalable biomedical data analysis solutions for governments, universities, institutions, and research consortia. The platforms enable a shared research environment that empower the users to bring together data management, custom analytics, and computation to support collaborative investigation of the causes of health and disease. Velsera has been actively involved in GA4GH to develop and adopt global intero ..read more