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DNAstack today announced Viral AI, a federated network for genomic variant surveillance and infectious disease research. Viral AI was designed to deliver equitable access to software infrastructure, accelerate international data sharing, and empower scientists and public health officials with globally representative datasets they need to mitigate current and future infectious disease outbreaks.

Our world is constantly changing and at its core, innovation is really about responding to change in a new, creative way. It requires courage, conviction, resilience, the support of a community of collaborators, and innovation-oriented policies in order to succeed.Digital technologies are driving much of this change, rapidly outpacing our traditional systems and infrastructure. It’s more important than ever that we bolster innovation to foster effective and sustainable health care, as well as economic growth.

Today, DNAstack revealed a software system built on standards developed by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) to enable federated analysis of genomics and related health data.

The system, demonstrated at the 8th Plenary Meeting of GA4GH earlier this week, features the first integration of multiple emerging standards for data access, discovery, and cloud computing, which are foundational for connecting secure, scalable, and distributed data sharing networks.

DNAstack is helping scientists around the globe better understand COVID-19, so they can develop treatments and vaccines.

To combat the current COVID-19 pandemic, scientists around the world are sequencing viral genomes at an accelerated pace.

These sequences are then being deposited into a number of international databases, including the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; Figure 1). There are limitations to this approach as multiple databases makes it challenging for a single researcher on their own to consolidate data from different sources. These data were generated and processed by different research groups at different institutions resulting in batch effects when amalgamated -- differences in signal across groups of viral genomes processed together that represent technical noise and not biological variation.  The distributed nature of the data and the lack of uniformity in data generation and processing hinders the pace of scientific discovery. To accelerate discovery, we need to leverage the breadth of data available internationally which requires data consolidation from multiple sources and data “cleaning” to reduce technical artifacts introduced during data processing.

DNAstack today announced COVID Cloud, an online destination for exploring one of the largest collections of viral genome sequences in the world. 

As the global caseload of COVID-19 exceeds 16.5 million people in over 200 countries, scientists are racing to study the genetics of the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, to inform the development of urgently needed diagnostics and treatments. COVID Cloud is a software solution created by DNAstack that connects and shares a large and growing number of viral genomes seen around the world combined with visualization and analytical tools for scientists to examine the molecular machinery of the virus as it continues to spread and evolve.