Fauna Bio Uses AWS to Harmonize Large Multi-Omic Datasets and Uncover Genes Relevant to Human Health

Researchers can struggle to harmonize large scale, multi-omic datasets to identify specific genes important for developing targeted treatments for human disease.

Hibernating animals effectively combat extreme physiologic changes that mirror human diseases. For example, they can experience the equivalent of 25 heart attacks each year but are able to protect and repair their tissue. Fauna Bio aims to uncover genes relevant to human health by identifying genes responsible for combating diseases in animals. To that end, Fauna Bio overlaps transcriptomic, epigenomic, and evolutionary rate analyses to uncover genes that would be effective therapeutic drug targets in humans.

Fauna Bio has amassed a vast database to store and process the data involved in these analyses. “We’re excited to be doing these analyses and storing our data on the AWS Cloud because this allows us efficient access to our many terabytes worth of data from multiple locations,” says Linda Goodman, chief technology officer at Fauna Bio. To make this huge dataset accessible to its own researchers and to collaborators, Fauna Bio has created a platform hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to choose among comparative genomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics data; select affected tissues of interest; designate the type of therapy to potentially develop; and then see a visual map of resulting gene networks, which can be analyzed and possibly moved on for further testing and development.