Verily, an Alphabet precision health technology company, has launched Viewpoint Workbench, a new enterprise-grade platform to unify multimodal data and accelerate biomedical research.
Workbench provides a secure collaborative environment for data generators, research, and biopharma organizations to govern and analyze their data. The platform is part of Verily Viewpoint, an end-to-end suite of solutions that power the evidence generation needed to make safe, effective therapies available faster to those who need them.
Workbench incorporates technology and best practices developed through years of building data infrastructure for large research initiatives such as the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Parkinson’s disease (AMP PD) program, and the Project Baseline Health Study.
“Researchers are gathering more data of more types than ever, but it is challenging to effectively store, access, and analyze it while complying with data governance mandates,” said Scott Burke, Chief Technology Officer, Verily. “Workbench can flexibly meet the needs of any organization size and type, allowing researchers to put data to work and generate insights that advance scientific understanding.”
Inaugural partners who will use Workbench to transform their research include Helix, The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF), and Target ALS.
- Helix, a population genomics and viral surveillance company, will use Workbench as a collaborative analysis environment for their health systems partners and commercial customers.
- MJFF, a global Parkinson’s research organization, will use Workbench to support their partners, the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative. MJFF also plans to employ Workbench across future research initiatives.
- Target ALS, a foundation working to accelerate drug development for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), will use Workbench to aggregate their data and make it available to ALS researchers to advance understanding of the disease and accelerate treatments.
“It’s crucial for our partners to have a platform that can bring layers of data together in a way that can meaningfully advance their work,” Dr. James Lu, M.D, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Helix. “We’re excited to incorporate Verily’s Workbench to enable more collaborative research and more informed insights.”
“We have successfully lowered barriers to accelerate ALS drug discovery over the last decade, and we must continue this momentum to find effective treatments for all forms of ALS,” said Manish Raisinghani, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., President and CEO, Target ALS. “Workbench aligns with our ambitious initiative to generate the most comprehensive biosample and dataset collection for ALS and provide no-strings-attached access to scientists worldwide to advance their work.”
Data generating organizations, research sponsors, and biomedical researchers can use Workbench to securely connect with stakeholders and partners, explore and analyze multimodal data, and simplify data governance with access control and policy enforcement. Workbench users can tap into a growing ecosystem of data sources and researchers, to build on collective scientific progress, share best practices, and conduct reproducible research.