
Verily Launches Viewpoint Workbench to Expedite Biomedical Research
Verily, a precision health technology company under Alphabet, has introduced Viewpoint Workbench, an enterprise-grade platform designed to consolidate multimodal data and expedite biomedical research. The Workbench platform offers a secure and collaborative environment for data generators, researchers, and biopharma organizations to govern and analyze their data. It is an integral part of Verily Viewpoint, a comprehensive suite of solutions aimed at expediting evidence generation for the development of safe and effective therapies.
Workbench incorporates advanced technology and best practices cultivated through years of experience in building data infrastructure for extensive research programs such as the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Parkinson’s disease (AMP PD) program, and the Project Baseline Health Study.
Several key partners have already agreed to utilize Workbench for their research endeavors, including Helix, The Michael J. Fox Foundation (MJFF), and Target ALS. Helix, a company specializing in population genomics and viral surveillance, plans to utilize Workbench as a collaborative analysis environment for their health systems partners and commercial customers. MJFF, a global Parkinson’s research organization, will leverage Workbench to support initiatives like the Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative. MJFF also intends to employ Workbench across future research endeavors. Target ALS, a foundation committed to accelerating drug development for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), will utilize Workbench to aggregate their data and make it accessible to ALS researchers, ultimately advancing the understanding of the disease and expediting treatment development.
“Researchers are gathering more data of more types than ever, but it is challenging to effectively store, access, and analyze it while complying with data governance mandates,” remarked Scott Burke, Chief Technology Officer at Verily. “Workbench can flexibly meet the needs of any organization size and type, allowing researchers to put data to work and generate insights that advance scientific understanding.”
Workbench is poised to empower data-generating organizations, research sponsors, and biomedical researchers by enabling secure connections with stakeholders and partners, facilitating the exploration and analysis of multimodal data, and simplifying data governance with access control and policy enforcement. Users of Workbench will have access to a growing ecosystem of data sources and fellow researchers, fostering collaborative scientific progress, sharing best practices, and facilitating reproducible research.