Originally published on Baylor College of Medicine News

To further support scientists working with next generation sequencing (NGS) data, Baylor College of Medicine is pleased to announce a licensing agreement with Genialis, Inc., for its NGS data management, analysis, visualization and dissemination software. Genialis Platform is a tool researchers can use to help centralize and organize data-intensive research programs.

“The agreement is meant to streamline the creative process in biological data processing,” said Dr. Adam Kuspa, senior vice president and interim dean of research at Baylor. “The best science is not carried out in a vacuum, but rather from teams of researchers with diverse expertise. This software will allow our faculty to easily share their data with different labs and research communities, fostering collaboration.”

Rafael Rosengarten, chief product officer with Genialis, said a main goal of this software is enabling non-computational life scientists – bench biologists and principal investigators – to engage more meaningfully with their data. A second aim is to provide bioinformaticians and computational biologists tools to develop and automate pipelines for scalable and reproducible data analysis.

“We want biologists to feel empowered to ask and answer questions and to generate novel, testable hypotheses with greater autonomy,” Rosengarten said. “And we also want to give the data experts a more systematic and straightforward way to access their science.”

Interacting with Genialis Platform primarily takes place using interactive visual analytics dashboards. The information layout allows researchers more time to work on new and complex projects, explore the data, trigger new analyses on the fly and examine and share the results of one or many experiments.

So far, six Baylor labs are actively engaged, contributing data, pipelines and feedback. The goal is to include a dozen or more labs by year’s end, and opening enrollment to other labs shortly thereafter.