CRN Exclusive: Google Adds New Life Science Platform Partners To GCP

Google has set its sights on the health care and life sciences space, and wants to help enterprises make better sense of valuable research and clinical data to improve outcomes for patients.

Google Cloud Platform today is helping enterprises manage, process, structure, and analyze biomedical data through both its own technology and services, as well as through partnerships. Google's built-in machine learning and big data analytics technologies are encouraging more platform and software providers in the life sciences and biomedical space to take a look at Google for their cloud computing needs, Joe Corkery, head of product for Google Cloud, Health Care and Life Sciences unit, told CRN exclusively.

"There's a lot of room for Google to make a big difference in the life sciences space by bringing our machine learning and analytics capabilities to the industry, especially in this era where they are generating larger and larger amounts of data and need new tools for working with that data at scale to provide new insights," Corkery said.

[Related: Google I/O: Google Infuses Apps, Android P With AI And Machine Learning]

Now, five new platform and software providers in the biomedical space are joining Google Cloud.

BC Platforms, a genomic data management and analytics platform, will now offer its GeneVision platform on top of Google Cloud. GeneVision is a Software-as-a-Service-based solution introduced in March that can help researchers translate raw genome data into actionable patient reports.

Petagene is the second new Google partner. It's offering, PetaSuite Cloud Edition, is a genomic compression solution that can save customers storage costs by running the company's pipelines directly to and from Google Cloud Storage as though they were local files, as well as from other public and private cloud storage platforms.

Another health care partner bringing its technology to Google Cloud Platform is OnRamp.Bio. The company's ROSALIND platform is a bioinformatics engine for analyzing and interpreting genomic data sets. According to OnRamp. Bio, ROSALIND offers biologists a simplified and interactive way to visualize data, without having to cobble together open source tools.

Last up is WuXi NextCODE, a genomics company that is helping researchers and clinicians use genomic data to uncover disease associated genomic markers in patients, families, cohorts and populations. The company's genomics aware suite will now be available through the Google Cloud Launcher marketplace.

AI and machine learning are key differentiators for Google Cloud Platform, Corkery said.

"We really want to make those capabilities available to the larger community, on a strong cloud platform," he said.

Google Cloud will formally introduce its five latest partners, as well as three of its existing biomedical partners this week at the Bio-IT World conference, including Elastifile, Komprise, and DNAstack.