EMBL-EBI Selects Google Cloud as Strategic Partner to Accelerate the Pace of Research

By STS News Desk On Dec 2, 2021

Hosting the world’s most comprehensive set of freely available and up-to-date molecular data resources, EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) announced it has chosen Google Cloud as a strategic cloud partner.

As part of a new, comprehensive, five-year partnership, EMBL-EBI will tap Google Cloud’s innovative technologies and global infrastructure to accelerate the pace of service delivery to its global user community, which includes research labs, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and more.

EMBL-EBI hosts a range of open data resources for the life sciences community, spanning genomics, proteins, chemical data, and more. These data resources are freely and openly available for anyone to use, similar to a digital public library. This approach supports open science and speeds up scientific discovery on a global scale.

EMBL-EBI will use Google Cloud’s cloud infrastructure and services to accelerate the processing of data from the community, providing more value for researchers and stakeholders, and delivering new insights through EMBL-EBI’s data resources.

The partnership between Google Cloud and EMBL-EBI aims to:

Improve access to biomedical research through the use of cloud technology as an exemplar to the global community.
Use analytics and machine learning to glean better insights from data to help speed up the pace of scientific discovery and to distribute these insights globally.
Support EMBL-EBI’s multicloud and hybrid-cloud strategy by providing a flexible platform to develop new cloud tools and technologies.
Train EMBL-EBI staff in building, deploying, and using cloud-native applications to accelerate cloud adoption within the life sciences community.

The use of cloud infrastructure will support EMBL-EBI’s goals, and will not change researchers’ access to EMBL-EBI data. The global research community will continue to have open access to the institute’s data resources and tools. The data hosted by EMBL-EBI will continue to be stored in the institute’s data centres and will remain accessible via existing methods indefinitely. Over time, copies of selected data may be stored and processed in Google Cloud, in compliance with EMBL’s internal data classification and data protection policies, and leveraging Google Cloud’s advanced data protection capabilities. All data stored on Google Cloud by EMBL-EBI remains under EMBL-EBI control and delivery.

Steven Newhouse, Head of Technical Services, EMBL-EBI said: “Google has an incredible network of life science expertise as well as infrastructure services that provide a tremendous opportunity to work together to help speed up scientific discovery. We’re excited about the possibilities that Google Cloud’s secure, flexible, and connected infrastructure can provide to EMBL-EBI to enable our services to be accessed globally.”

Mark Palmer, Head of Public Sector, EMEA, Google Cloud, commented: “As we continue our work with customers in the research space, the impact of cloud computing becomes increasingly clear. As part of this new partnership, we have the opportunity to accelerate research by providing EMBL-EBI with high performance computing solutions that will provide researchers with the tools and compute to drive more effective and efficient research.”