Making genomic data exchange future-ready, CSIRO developed Serverless Beacon, which utilizes a new cloud-architecture paradigm (serverless, or Function-as-a-Service) that allows seamless scaling of compute resources on public cloud providers.

The most used exchange protocol for genomic data between international cohorts and clinical services is the GA4GH Beacon protocol, however current implementations are unable to economically scale to the large cohort sizes of the future. This is because they rely on data being served from a centralized database, which causes costs to persist and increase dramatically with both variant number and cohort size.

The Serverless Beacon, provide a solution that is more scalable and economical than the traditional implementation, hence catering for cohort sizes of the future.

Value Proposition

Fast and cost-effective solution irrespective of data sizes

Serverless Beacon allows the seamless scaling of compute resources. We have demonstrated on a real-world cohort that Serverless Beacon can keep query time constant at 1 second. It is also more cost-effective than the traditional implementation (e.g. $3.20/month vs $670/month for 100 queries per hour of a 100-individual cohort with 85 million variants).

More control over privacy and ownership

Allowing data to remain de-centralized provides the added benefit of fine-control over data privacy and ownership of the individual genomic files (VCF, gVCF) contributing to a Beacon.

Easily extendable to query add-ons

As each component is an independent module, it can be easily exchanged to allow additional functionality, such as a FHIR-based phenotype filtering step.

Pricing

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