Toronto, Ontario — DNAstack today launched Omics AI, a revolutionary new software suite for omics and health research.

Omics AI makes scientific discoveries faster and more powerful by enabling insights across federated networks of data, in compliance with open standards by the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH). The system is being used by world leading pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, universities, patient advocacy groups, funders, sequencing facilities, government agencies, and consortiums to grow collaborative networks in diverse areas of research.

Omics data are distributed

Data fuel discoveries. Yet, too often, scientists and decision makers cannot access large or diverse enough data to answer their questions. This is because the data they need are siloed across many different institutions, provinces, states, countries, clouds, devices, and software systems. Siloization makes it nearly impossible to leverage the collective power in the world’s exponentially growing number of omics and health datasets to make discoveries. 

The future is federated

Omics AI enables a new way of making discoveries that simultaneously makes it easier for data stewards to make their datasets more accessible, while making it easier for researchers to access and analyze more data than ever before. Instead of following the traditional model of “data sharing” where data contributors send data to researchers, Omics AI follows a new paradigm of “data federation” where researchers send questions to contributors. Each contributor in the federated network can approve researchers to ask specific questions in a privacy-preserving way while keeping sensitive data private. This approach is faster, more secure, scalable, and compliant, while empowering data contributors to retain sovereignty, control, measure impact, and enforce attribution.

How it works

Omics AI is a suite of three software products for creating standards compliant federated networks and running analyses across them. Publisher helps data stewards maximize the impact of their data, wherever it lives. It makes it easy to connect, organize, manage access, standardize, and register datasets with networks powered by Explorer. Explorer is a federated data portal. It provides a unified user experience for finding, accessing, and searching across federated networks, and analyzing them with analytics tools like Workbench. Workbench helps scientists turn data into discoveries. It enables scientists to run analyses across distributed datasets. This includes the capability to perform federated learning with toolkits like integrate.ai, which train AI/ML models without moving sensitive data between systems. The end-to-end software suite is compliant with GA4GH standards with support for multiple cloud platforms, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, as well as on premises.

An internet for omics and health discoveries

Omics AI builds on the award-winning efforts by DNAstack and its partners to deliver Viral AI and Neuroscience AI, global federated networks for infectious disease and neuroscience research. Now, with Omics AI, anyone can create public and private networks of their own. The launch of these products demonstrates continuity in DNAstack’s vision to make research more collaborative, diverse, accessible, equitable, sovereign, sustainable, and impactful.

Taking technology to the fight

DNAstack has partnered with world-leading organizations who are using Omics AI to create collaborative networks to help address some of the biggest challenges in human health.

Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s

Aligning Science Across Parkinson's (ASAP) is a funding initiative with a mission to accelerate the pace of discovery and inform the path to a cure for Parkinson’s disease through collaboration, research-enabling resources, and data sharing. In pursuit of this, The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF) stands as a trusted implementation partner for ASAP, who is using Omics AI to power the ASAP Collaborative Research Network (CRN) Cloud platform.

Target ALS

Target ALS is a medical research foundation committed to the search for effective treatments for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Founded in 2013 by former New York City deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, Target ALS has transformed ALS research through their landmark Innovation Ecosystem model. The organization aims to accelerate ALS drug discovery with the goal of realizing a world in which everyone lives. Target ALS is using Omics AI to power their data portal, a platform that will accelerate data sharing, discoveries, and translational impact by a global community of ALS researchers

Roche Canada

Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. (Roche Canada) is a biotech company focused on discovering new medicines and diagnostics while establishing data-based insights that evolve the practice of medicine to help patients live longer, better lives. Roche Canada is using Omics AI to share data from clinical trials with a network of trusted researchers and leaders in neuroscience. Through efforts like federated insights, Roche Canada is demonstrating that additional value can be generated from existing data, ultimately leading to a better understanding of disease and more rapid development of patient solutions.

Canadian Platform for Genomics & Precision Health

The Canadian Platform for Genomics & Precision Health is an initiative funded with federal support through DIGITAL. The collaboration brings together Canadian and international leaders in genome science, artificial intelligence, genome sequencing, pharma, research funding, policy, and ethics on an aligned mission to create national, federated, standards compliant data infrastructure for omics and health. As part of this initiative, Omics AI is supporting multiple use cases to create and grow inter-provincial, national, and international networks.

Powered by open standards 

Omics AI is unique in that it can enable federated insights in compliance with open standards developed by the GA4GH, the de facto international standards body for genomics and related data. The system aligns with FAIR Principles by making scientific data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, while enabling data stewards and consumers to adhere to international privacy regulations like PIPEDA, HIPAA, and GDPR.

Get started today

Omics AI is available for general use starting today. For more information or to request access, visit https://omics.ai or contact info@dnastack.com.

About DNAstack

DNAstack is a Canadian company whose mission is to save and improve lives by unlocking the collective power of the world’s genomics and health data. Omics AI is a software suite by DNAstack that enables privacy-preserving federated insights across distributed data. DNAstack is a global leader in the development of open, interoperable standards as part of the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH) and has led multiple collaborative innovation projects as part of DIGITAL.