Google Cloud is working with the National Institutes of Health to make select NIH-funded datasets available to users in a secure environment for biomedical research, the tech giant announced July 24.
As the newest partner of the NIH's Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability Initiative — an effort aimed at leveraging commercial cloud computing for biomedical research — Google will simplify access to various research datasets by integrating researcher authentication and authorization mechanisms with Google Cloud credentials.
"Biomedical research faces enormous challenges as the volume of genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, phenotypic and other data generated in research labs across the world continues to grow," Google Cloud's announcement reads. "By helping researchers to discover and authenticate against these datasets using open standards, and by making these datasets ready for researchers to perform scalable analytics and data science, we hope to usher in the next generation of biomedical discoveries."
As part of its work with the NIH, Google is also working with the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health and the BioCompute Consortium to help devise industry standards for data access, discovery and cloud computation.