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Ed Lane of the Allen Institute for Brain Science speaking on stage
Courtesy: AWS
Just as the periodic table is fundamental to chemistry, and the Human Genome Project has revolutionized modern genetics, researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences with Amazon Web Services To create what could become a “transformational” new resource for the field of neuroscience.
AWS on Wednesday announce Its technology will support the Allen Institute as it builds a map of the human brain, called the Brain Knowledge Platform. This platform, the first of its kind, is designed to be a complete reference on individual brain cells and should eventually function as the world’s largest open source database of brain cells.
To build the new platform, the Allen Institute is using single-cell genomics techniques. The researchers measure the genes that individual brain cells use to create a “cell fingerprint,” and cells with similar fingerprints will be grouped into “cell types,” resulting in a high-resolution map of the entire brain.
Once the reference is complete, scientists should better understand the connections between genetics and different cognitive functions. Researchers believe the platform can provide insights into why diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s occur.
“This is like the periodic table of the brain,” said Dr. Ed Lane, senior researcher at the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences, during a presentation about the platform in Washington, D.C. ever accessed before.”
The Allen Institute is a nonprofit research institute based in Seattle. It is made up of several different institutes, including one focused on neuroscience, and is perhaps best known for creating a number of different large-scale data sources.
But while the data at the Allen Institute is no stranger, there are hundreds of billions of cells in the brain — so creating a reference such as the Brain Knowledge Platform would mean researchers would have to deal with vast amounts of data.
“We’re just having these massive, massive problems with the volume of data,” Lin said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday. “The amount of data is getting bigger and bigger.”
As such, the Allen Institute is leveraging cloud computing and machine learning from AWS to unify and consolidate complex brain data into one place.
When conducting research involving genetics and imaging, scientists often work with petabytes and even exabytes of data. Consuming 40 petabytes of data would require someone to watch 4K video 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 100 years, Dr. Roland Elling, director of international health for the public sector at AWS, said at the press conference.
The amount of data available to researchers is expected to continue to grow in the coming years, but Lin said there is also a lot of brain data out there in the field of neuroscience. The problem, he said, is that much of it is unregulated and decentralized, making it difficult for researchers to access.
The Allen Institute plans to use AWS technology to successfully interpret this disparate data even if it is stored across different formats and locations, which Lane said will further democratize access to knowledge and bring parts of the neuroscience community together.
“While this is really in its infancy now, the goal of the Brain Knowledge Platform is to turn this fragmented neuroscience information landscape into a unified ecosystem,” he said.
The Allen Institute will work to build the Brain Knowledge Platform over the next five years. It’s still in its infancy, Lin said, but the technology’s potential is huge.
“If we can do that, imagine the impact on the field,” he said. “We can unite disparate parts of the field that can’t talk to each other at the moment. We can accelerate our understanding of brain function, as well as new approaches to treating disease.”
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