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Platforma

Platforma is a system for efficient biological data analysis and management. It consists of two main components: the Desktop application, that provides users with intuitive interface for working with various biological software, and server-side backend service, that orchestrates all data, software, containers and analysis operations.

Deployment →

Deploy Platforma in your infrastructure.

Platforma SDK →

Develop your custom Platforma blocks.

Background​

There are several domain-specific aspects of the computational biology field that influence Platforma's architecture and should be considered when developing Blocks:

  • Complex and Resource-Intensive Data Processing: The advent of technologies such as Next Generation Sequencing has introduced big data into biomedicine. Processing such data with bioinformatics tools often requires substantial computational resources, involving high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and cloud platforms, and is typically time-consuming.

  • Bridging the Gap Between Biologists and Data: Biomedical research is primarily conducted by biologists and clinicians who plan experiments, work with patients, collect blood and tissue samples, and generate data. However, once data is produced by sequencers, there is often a lack of software that allows for user-friendly data analysis. As a result, computational scientists with expertise in Linux and tools like Jupyter or R notebooks must be involved to perform analyses and create visualizations.

  • Multi-Modal Nature of Modern Research: Contemporary biomedical research involves diverse sources and types of data, necessitating various analytical tools to process and derive insights. Integrating results from different tools can be challenging, even for computational scientists, yet it is essential for extracting meaningful insights from the data.

Platforma was developed to address these challenges. It empowers biologists by providing an interface for interactive data exploration that speaks their language, while offering powerful tools for computational scientists to package their developments and deliver them to biological users effectively.