The Hyve: Leveraging Open Source Platforms for Translational Research

Collaboration and timely access to data are the needed variables for carrying out research and clinical interventions. In the biotechnology and life sciences arena, companies are looking for befitting technology solutions and platform that give them the needed visibility to engage in translational research and find new drugs and therapeutic concepts to keep the risk of diseases at bay. “We believe in helping companies to harness the power of open source platforms to build strong solutions, and ensure better collaboration to facilitate clinical studies and translational research,” begins Kees van Bochove, CEO, The Hyve. The Utrecht, Netherlands, and Cambridge, MA based organization operates on three core values—share, reuse, and specialize. “We believe that open sharing of software and data yields more benefits for everyone, and also deploy the reuse approach to bolster innovation,” says Van Bochove. “And lastly, we have a multidisciplinary team that is specialized in helping firms use open source software for bioinformatics and translational research.”

The firm works to bridge the gap between academic institutions, universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical firms, and food companies with solutions that provide data integration and visualization. The Hyve’s open source bioinformatics and translational research solutions and services aids in the visualization of large amounts of biological and clinical data.

In addition, the company offers services for system integration, requirements analysis and project definition, data loading, software development and application support as well as develops web applications to analyze and visualize data from data warehouses. The Hyve uses several open source platforms for translational medicine, including TranSMART, OHDSI, ADAM, cBioPortal, and Galaxy, and also uses general data science and cloud provisioning tools such as R, Python, Jupyter, OpenStack, Docker, Mesos and Apache Spark.

TranSMART is a knowledge management platform that enables scientists to develop and refine research hypotheses by investigating correlations between genetic and phenotypic data. TheADAM platform is used for genomics data and involves a set of formats for scalable storage of genomics data and algorithms for various computations.