Cohen Veterans Bioscience partners with OCC to establish the Brain Commons database

Sep 28 2017

Cohen Veterans Bioscience today announced its partnership with the Open Commons Consortium to establish the Brain Commons – a one-of-a-kind cloud-hosted site for combining Big Data that will be critical for the understanding of brain conditions. The OCC platform is uniquely positioned to manage large-scale imaging data, genomic data, wearables, and clinical data, as well as enable machine learning and analytics at state-of-the-art computing speeds to accelerate our understanding of brain conditions and brain health.

The Brain Commons database will be hosted at the University of Chicago's Open Commons Consortium – a leading organization in the drive to Open Data sharing, and a driving force in new technologies for Genomics data sharing. Its Chair, and Director of the Center for Data Intensive Science, Robert Grossman said, "We are thrilled to collaborate with a progressive organization like Cohen Veterans Bioscience to develop an entirely new way to bring together brain data from across the community. This has already been a powerful approach in cancer genomics, and we are excited to work with Dr. Haas and her team to see how our experience can now be extended to impact brain health."

The Brain Commons will also leverage the partnership between Cohen Veterans Bioscience and Exaptive, Inc. to build a Cognitive City – a user interface to the Commons. The Cognitive City brings data, software tools, and people together in an ecosystem where interoperability, modularity, and community are core features and boundary-crossing through repurposing data and code is actively facilitated.

"Just like physical cities are built where there are ample natural resources, a Cognitive City must be built atop an easily accessible supply of data," said Dave King, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Exaptive, Inc. "The Brain Commons offers just such an abundance – a flexible repository that can scale in both breadth and depth, allowing for new types of analyses to be performed across diverse datasets."

"Many organizations are gathering excellent datasets but don't necessarily have the means to share them, and analyze them together. It is going to take a highly motivated, interconnected village to tackle the obstacles posed by brain diseases. We very much hope that the village will be the Brain Commons," said Dr. Jane Roskams, Executive Director for the Commons.​