Catalytic Data Science Joins the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance to Combat COVID-19

WILTON, Conn. and SEATTLE, May 29, 2020 — Catalytic Data Science, a provider of life sciences R&D workflow solutions, announced that it has joined the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance to help develop new diagnostic and therapeutic approaches that mitigate COVID-19. Catalytic Data Science, with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is providing a free and open version of the Catalytic Platform to all researchers, data scientists, physicians, healthcare providers, developers, and other experts working to solve current COVID-19 challenges as well as create innovative approaches to avert future pandemic threats. Pandemic Alliance members can access the Catalytic Platform by visiting https://edu.catalyticds.com, clicking Get Started and entering COVID19Alliance in the coupon section of the XPrize login.

The XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance was launched, in collaboration with Anthem, to call on the global community to unite, collaborate and share information to address immediate needs and find long- term durable solutions to pandemic threats. The Alliance has activated initiatives across twelve focus areas, ranging from treatment to monitoring to patient experience, and focused on accelerating and scaling existing efforts as well as filling gaps where solutions do not exist. Over 190 Alliance members have stepped up with ideas, sponsorship, support, and man-hours to find solutions to combat COVID-19 and prepare us for future pandemics.

The Catalytic Platform is a cloud-based informatics workspace designed to centralize all of the resources and network all of the researchers required to accelerate scientific workflows. A customized instance of the Catalytic Platform dedicated to COVID-19 research is available to all XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance members and includes:

• > 134,000 COVID-19 research papers that can be searched and text mined
• > 1,745 COVID-19 clinical trials that can be searched and text mined
• Approximately 32,660 GISAID FASTA sequences (updated daily)
• SARS-CoV-2 reference genome
• UCSC COVID-19 genome browser, variants and annotations
• OA 10x genomics scRNA-seq/TCR-seq BALF samples. 6 severe and 3 moderate COVID-19 patients and 3 healthy controls.
• 14 analytic and bioinformatic pipelines useful for COVID-19 research (e.g variant detection, transcriptome analyses, pathway analyses, functional annotation, clinical relevance, GWAS, BLAST+, qPCR, weighted correlation network analysis, scRNA tools, multiple sequence alignment and others)
• > 50 datasets, tools, dashboards, statistic datasets, factsheets, maps, data visualizations, trackers and data repositories
• In-app collaboration workflows and team messaging

“We are excited to join the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance and contribute to the global research effort targeting new diagnostic and therapeutic solutions. The Catalytic team has worked quickly to create a COVID-19 customized version of our informatics platform designed for Alliance members to conduct their research from anywhere in the world. We are very grateful to the AWS team for providing the support and resources required to keep the Catalytic Platform open and free to all Alliance members,” said Scott Sacane, Chief Executive Officer, Catalytic Data Science.

“The XPRIZE mission has always focused around collaboration to solve humanity’s greatest challenges, and that is now more important than ever as we’ve seen the world unite in the battle against COVID-19,” said Amir Banifatemi, XPRIZE Chief Innovation and Growth Officer. “We welcome Catalytic Data Sciences, in partnership with AWS, to the XPRIZE Pandemic Alliance and look forward to their contributions and continuing together this important work that will help accelerate solutions.”

“COVID-19 is a global crisis bigger than any one organization can tackle alone, and this is why we are committed to collaborating with government, community, and business partners to fight this pandemic together,” said Rajeev Ronanki, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Anthem, Inc. “Since launching the alliance with XPRIZE, this effort has accelerated cooperation across all Alliance members to provide insights to leaders working to understand and address the impact of COVID-19 in their communities. Anthem and our other Alliance members welcome Catalytic Data Sciences and AWS to this effort and know their contributions will significantly help us in this battle.”

Source: Catalytic Data Science