Reimagining Genomics Data Analysis: Interview with Paolo Di Tommaso from Seqera Labs
With BioNTech’s recent $200 million merger with OncoC4’s cancer drug, the demand for personalised medicines to treat diseases such as cancer continues to grow. Much of this development stems from pharmaceutical biotech companies sharing their cutting-edge bioinformatics data on open-source platforms for others to use.
Here is our interview with Paolo Di Tommaso, CTO & Co-founder of Seqera Labs which has a global community of over 15,000 researchers, where we talk about this largely unreported trend. Its flagship product, Nextflow, facilitates this approach to ‘open science’ and is the de facto software of its kind, transforming the way the sector approaches sharing and analysing data. Seqera Labs works with some of the largest pharmaceutical, life sciences and genomics companies worldwide – including AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Oxford Nanopore.
Paolo explains how having access to the necessary infrastructure to analyse genomic datasets at scale is speeding up innovation at the earliest levels of scientific research and what this trend means in terms of the scientists behind them, working together.
Andrii: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your journey as a bioinformatician, which ultimately led to the founding of Seqera Labs?
Paolo: I have a master’s degree in computer science and have worked as a software engineer for several years in varying industry fields including telecommunications and banking, as well as non-profit organisations like the Agency for Food and Agriculture of the United Nations (FAO).
With the rise of the cloud and big data, the potential application into the life sciences sector was substantial and, whilst also wanting to make a real world impact in this industry, I decided to get a master’s degree in bioinformatics in 2008.
In 2010, I began working as a research engineer at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, with the purpose of exploring methods to help streamline the use of cloud in bioinformatics benchmarks and data analysis. Whilst offering powerful technologies, the initial solutions were ultimately failures and no longer aligned with what I was researching.
Around 2013, I began focusing on new ideas for a different approach to the deployment of data pipelines at scale and, born out of my frustrations of previous experiences, I realized the way forward was to enable researchers to scale data analysis in a portable and reproducible manner across different computing infrastructure without breaking their typical workflow as a developer. Hence, Nextflow was created.
In the first few months, the technology was similar to other lab projects I was running at the time, however a community of users rapidly grew, providing feedback and asking for new features.
It was ultimately under these conditions that Seqera Labs was launched and is very much a success story owing to the popularity of open source and the open science approach. We have seen this first hand through our technology; when you share knowledge, you increase its value.
Andrii: What was the inspiration behind creating Seqera Labs, and how does the company's mission to simplify complex data analysis pipelines in the cloud contribute to the biotech industry?
Paolo: The inspiration behind creating Seqera Labs was born out of mine, and my fellow co-founder Evan Floden’s, realization that the Nextflow project was growing well beyond what a typical research lab could offer.
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With the rise of the cloud and big data, the potential application into the life sciences sector was substantial and, whilst also wanting to make a real world impact in this industry, I decided to get a master’s degree in bioinformatics in 2008.
