Sweta Ladwa of the National Institutes of Health recently said that her agency’s BioData Catalyst cloud platform is set to undergo an expansion later this year to host more data types in addition to the clinical and genomic data it is already home to, Federal News Network reported Friday.
Ladwa, who heads the NIH’s Scientific Solutions Delivery Branch, told attendees at a recent AFCEA Bethesda-sponsored panel discussion that the aim of BioData Catalyst is to provide researchers with a free and accessible resource for biomedical data that would facilitate scientific advances benefiting public health.
The NIH official explained that the expansion includes imaging data as well as various tools that would make it easier for users to mine the information.
“A lot of tooling is associated with data types, but it also could be workflows, pipelines or applications that help the researchers really meet their use cases. And those use cases are all over the place because there’s just a wealth of data there. There’s so much that can be done,” Ladwa said.
The chief of the Scientific Solutions Delivery Branch also pointed out the collaboration that undergirds the cloud platform, saying, “To do this, it takes a lot of different skills, expertise and different entities. It’s a partnership between a lot of different people to make this resource available to the community.”