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.

OHDSI is a series of tools to carry out observational and real world medical data analysis

The cBioPortal for cancer genomics provides visualization, analysis and download of large-scale cancer genomics data sets. OHDSI is a series of tools that leverage the OMOP data model to carry out observational and real world medical data analysis. Lastly, Galaxy, the open, web-based platform enables data intensive biomedical research on the free public server to perform, reproduce, and share complete analysis. “Our core real strength lies in the unique combination of our domain knowledge in bioinformatics and medicine with an advanced understanding of the modern data science tools and platforms,” extols Van Bochove.

In one instance, IMI, a public-private initiative for developing better and safer medicines for patients, runs a project called EMIF (European Medical Information Framework) to create a common information framework. The project aims to link up patient-level data into the data platform in order to facilitate access to medical and research data sources to help researches determine and identify links between therapies and medical outcomes. The Hyve is involved in the requirements gathering and software development, around the open source platforms OHDSI and TranSMART to successfully identify new ways of research and study health outcomes.

The success stories of the company stand as a testament to the functionality of The Hyve’s open source software solutions in eliminating challenges around research. “We look to the future to expand more in clinical areas and carry on with our quest to offer complete and robust open source software that simplify data and knowledge application to help in translational and clinical researches,” concludes Van Bochove.