European Bioinformatics Institute Taps Google Cloud as ‘Strategic’ Cloud Partner

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and CAMBRIDGE, U.K. — The European Bioinformatics Institute selected Google Cloud as its “strategic” cloud partner to “accelerate the pace” of the institute’s research.

Under the five-year partnership, the institute hosting molecular data will tap Google Cloud’s technologies and infrastructure to increase the rate of service delivery to its global user community, including research labs, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions, according to Google Cloud last month.

The institute is part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and known as EMBL-EBI. It hosts a range of open data resources for the life sciences community, spanning genomics, proteins, and chemical data. The data resources are freely and openly available for “anyone to use,” supporting open science and speeding up scientific discovery.

EMBL-EBI will use Google Cloud’s 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 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 centers and remain accessible via existing methods “indefinitely.” 

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 data protection capabilities. All data stored on Google Cloud by EMBL-EBI remains under EMBL-EBI control and delivery. 

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

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

Google Cloud’s network of life sciences expertise and infrastructure services provide “a tremendous opportunity to work together to help speed up scientific discovery,” said Steven Newhouse, head of technical services, EMBL-EBI.

Mark Palmer, head of public sector, EMEA at Google Cloud, said the company has 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.”