India’s genomic and biologic data — residing in silos across the country’s research institutions, companies, hospitals and academia in unusable formats — will soon find a home in a national repository. This Indian genomic/biologic data is routinely uploaded to global databases and shared by the life science community, while the developed world has a strict protocol for storing, sharing and securing this kind of data.
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing’s (C-DAC) Bioinformatics Group in Pune has developed a platform called Integrated Computing Environment (ICE), which will serve as the first step towards building the national repository. Rajendra Joshi, senior director and head, HPC: Medical and Bioinformatics Applications, C-DAC, said the life-science data generated from the Indian studies on humans, animals, plants and microbes was of tremendous strategic importance. “This data is also crucial for novel drug and vaccine development that leads to effective and precise public healthcare solutions,” Joshi said.
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ICE is an indigenous cloud-based genomics data facility. The ICE integrates the ICE-cube — a hardware infrastructure — and ICE-flakes, the software component to store and analyse “petascale to exascale of genomics data” in a secure manner. It would help researchers to uncover the complete potential of the data to deliver India-specific products and solutions in healthcare, agriculture, livestock and the environment.
E Magesh, director-general, C-DAC, said the Bioinformatics Group at C-DAC had capabilities in high-performance computing, big data, cloud, AI and accelerators that would help in areas such as analysis of huge genomic data to make an actionable decision and deliver India-specific products.
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The life sciences data generated from Indian studies on humans, animals, plants and microbes are a national resource, but could be misused (for instance, for bioterrorism). Thus, there is a need for protecting and preserving these. This data is going to be crucial for drug discovery and vaccine development; mapped against the biological data of Indians, drugs/vaccines can be made more efficient and better tolerated. Researchers with authorised access will soon be able to use the data in a private and confidential way and carry out the analysis for a lot of learning from the data.
“Such data is valuable and must reside in India,” Joshi said. Around the world, many nations have built the capability to store and analyze large amounts of genomics data like the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (US), the European Bioinformatics Institute and DNA Data Bank of Japan.