Lemonade Stand Foundation accelerates the research process and cleans up genome data with the help of Amazon Web Services’ Imagine Grant.
The nonprofit foundation is trying to expand its Childhood Cancer Data Lab to make crucial data available and accessible to researchers. With over 1.3 million genome-wide samples, the foundation has to find ways in order to streamline the data sharing and transfer processes.
The organization has been on the lookout for the critical gaps in childhood cancer research, through a multitude of datasets. Here, researchers are dealing with complicated data analysis without the right funding.
Co-executive director Liz Scott said she recently discovered the lack of funding to handle the large datasets to bridge the gap from the patients to the researchers. In fact, Scott found out that young researchers can’t even perform basic data analysis with the lack of resources.
In addition to zero resources, the foundation also has limited people with expertise in pediatric oncology. Workshops aren’t helping too, and the momentum is significantly affected due to the lack of tools and training programs.
Scott started the CCDL program to build tools and training programs. This makes it easier for researchers to use and analyze the large data sets. Lemonade Stand Foundation also runs the refine.bio repository to process and transcribe data from public sources.
This platform processed roughly 756.9 terabytes of raw data, with an average of 17,000 visitors. Users can download 1,441 datasets, with researchers downloading and organizing data. According to users, the CCDL saves researchers time of about two weeks to clean up and organize raw data.
“Finding the right people to lead this effort was the greatest thing we could do to make this successful,” said Scott.
The team also includes several data scientists and engineers, UX designers, and two biological data analysts. These experts need to use a large research investment in the biomedical space to spend lots of time finding the data.
Cloud Computing
Amazon’s cloud computing services can make the data discoverable for the scientists and speed up the process to scale millions of samples. The principal data scientist Jaclyn Taroni, Ph.D., said the lab’s work helps unlock billions of dollars of research investment.
AWS’ incredible data science and elastic search come in handy in this type of system. Scott said the AWS grant helped the foundation to scale up the lab work and continue to fund the grant afterward.
