Toronto-based DNAstack has announced an update to its cloud-based genomics software platform.

DNAstack said the update features a new application called Workflow, which aims to help genome scientists find, develop, share, and run bioinformatic workflows at scale. DNAstack added that the update will allow the company to increase global access to bioinformatics by offering its platform without a subscription fee for research use and pay-per-use pricing for data storage and computation.

“Our mission is to improve and save lives by democratizing access to genomics data and the infrastructure needed to analyze it at scale,” said Marc Fiume, CEO and co-founder of DNAstack. “With the release of this application, we’re making the latest technologies in genomics broadly accessible and fostering standards to promote open science, reproducibility, sharing, and collaboration.”

According to DNAstack, Workflow’s users can access curated pipelines like Broad Institute’s GATK Best Practices, an end-to-end genotyping toolkit, or author their own customer analyses. The Workflow app also includes a Workflow Description Editor (WDL) to help software developers and bioinformaticians develop, refine, and run their pipelines in the cloud.

As part of its product update, DNAstack said it has collaborated with the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research and the University of California, Santa Cruz to connect the Workflow App to Dockstore, which is a set of tools and workflows shared by members of the bioinformatics community. Through this collaboration, users can browse the catalogue of pipelines available on Dockstore and click to deploy them on their own data in DNAstack.

“Consistent and coordinated processing of millions of samples collected from around the world will be needed to resolve complex diseases like cancer,” said Brian O’Connor, who helped create Dockstore. “Dockstore is a resource for sharing Docker-based workflow definitions, and the integration with DNAstack brings exciting new efficiencies and scale with which they can be run.” DNAstack is the first system to streamline execution of workflows from Dockstore.

In January, DNAstack received an undisclosed investment from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP)

StartUp HERE Toronto is a publishing partner of Betakit and this article was originally published on their site.