Case study published by Burwood Group : OCC is Democratizing Scientific Research on Google Cloud

The dream held by OCC is to provide the researchers with the data and resources they need to find the answers to the most formidable problems they seek to solve. To make this dream into reality - OCC, Burwood, and Google Cloud accomplished together the result of hard work that made it easy for first time users, students and researchers to access data for continuous research by implementing Gen3 Workspaces on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This accelerated the adoption and use of the Gen3 data platform, used by researchers internally to accelerate and democratize the process of scientific discovery, especially over large or complex datasets.

To know more about it, please click here: https://rb.gy/ia1ti

Open Commons Consortium Product Launch

We are delighted to announce the product “Direct Pay" which enables use of pay for compute services for furthering scientific research using a direct payment method on the Gen3  Biomedical Research Hub (BRH).  This is a joint initiative with the University of Chicago, Center for Translational Data Science and AWS Pro Services, DDI initiative to enable the functionality of Direct Pay to BRH, allowing additional payment methods for the use of data mashes and data commons for social impact.

Ten lessons with Data sharing with Data commons

It’s been over a decade that we are working to support and accelerate scientific research by building data commons with the means to share and analyze large data sets in a secure and compliant environment. Director, Robert Grossman discusses lessons learned from this experience & benefits of Data Commons. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-02029-x 

Publication on Contrived Materials in Liquid Biopsy validation from BLOODPAC

The newest BLOODPAC publication is out. This study sheds new light on how contrived materials—commercially available stand-ins for patient samples—can help streamline the testing and validation of liquid biopsy assays. One step closer to improving outcomes for patients with cancer https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525157822003646

OCC team implements Gen3 Workspaces on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Open Commons Consortium (OCC)  embarked on a project to deploy best practices within their Google Cloud Platform (GCP) tenant. The goal of this project was to deploy a strong foundation that can be built upon with constraints and best practices.

The desired outcome of this project was to develop the GCP foundation setup for Gen3 infrastructure implementation with automation. The scope was also to build up Commons Services Operations Center (CSOC) which will be the master cloud organization for all GCP projects with operational consistency and security with help of Burwood alongside Google. OCC introduced a project based billing for responsible users using cloud computing services.

OCC team publishes paper on Racial/Ethnic Disparities in COVID 19 Case Fatality Rate

OCC team publishes Racial/Ethnic Disparities in the Observed COVID-19 Case Fatality Rate Among the U.S. Population. The purpose of this study was to examine racial/ethnic differences in COVID-19 case fatality rates (CFRs) at the U.S. national level during the first year of the pandemic. We used data from The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project (CTP), whose Racial Data Tracker was widely regarded as the most complete source of information on race/ethnicity of COVID-19 cases and deaths during this period. 

CFR by month and racial/ethnic group with CTP and CDC datasets

We performed a parallel analysis using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Use data—an independently compiled and regularly updated individual-level data source. Although less complete than the CTP data, the CDC data contain information on age. Adjusting for age is critical to get an accurate understanding of differences in COVID-19 CFR. We focused on the two largest minority groups, Blacks/African Americans and Latinx, and their comparison to Whites, since these categories are reported most completely by a large number of states and territories, and permit approximate comparability between the two datasets.