EU: Scalable, Secure Storage and Analysis of Biobank Data (BioBankCloud)

Genomics research has high value to both society and industry. It is used by biomedicine researchers, hospital diagnostics, food industries, agronomy, and pharmaceutical industries. A quantum shift is happening in the area of human genomics. A huge wave of big data is approaching, driven by the decreasing cost of sequencing genomic data, which has been halving every 4 months since 2004. Biobanks that are used to store and catalogue human biological material are not prepared to handle this wave of data – there is a biobank bottleneck: a lack of platform support for the storage, analysis and interconnection of the coming massive amounts of human genomic data. In this project, we will develop a cloud-computing platform as a service (PaaS) for the storage, analysis and inter-connection of biobank data. The platform will provide security, storage, data-intensive tools and algorithms, and support for allowing biobanks to share data with one another, all within the existing regulatory frameworks for the storage and usage of biobank data.