Funding Boosts Expansion of Key Biomedical Tools
Prof. Dr. Dr. Fabian Theis, Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and Chair of the Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems at the Technical University of Munich, has been awarded a two-year grant of $400,000 for the project “Scaling the Foundations of scverse.” This funding comes from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, in partnership with The Wellcome Trust and The Kavli Foundation. The project is part of the “Essential Open Source Software for Science” program, which aims to support the maintenance, growth, development, and community engagement of crucial open-source tools in scientific research.
Open-source software is essential in scientific research, driving progress in biology and medicine while ensuring reproducibility and transparency. Despite its critical role, many vital research software tools often lack dedicated funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) Essential Open Source Software for Science (EOSS) program addresses this issue by supporting the maintenance, growth, and development of key open-source tools.
Fabian Theis, along with software engineers Ilan Gold and Philipp Angerer from Helmholtz Munich and the Technical University of Munich (TUM), have now received a two-year funding for their project “Scaling the Foundations of scverse.” The EOSS initiative focuses on expanding the core data structures of scverse for out-of-core/cloud-based analysis, significantly boosting the efficiency and scalability of single-cell and spatial-omics data processing.
Cloud-Powered Innovations
The scverse project aims to improve the handling of large biological datasets by making its core tools – AnnData, MuData, and SpatialData – more efficient for cloud-based processing. This upgrade will help manage data more effectively, much like streaming a video online where only the needed parts are loaded. By getting support from the broader scientific community, scverse will enable new ways to analyze data and enhance existing methods. Currently, scverse offers machine learning and visualization tools for large biomedical data, but these tools are not yet optimized for cloud use. With the increasing availability of cell atlases and new models for single-cell data, there is a growing need to process this data at a larger scale. The project will expand scverse’s capabilities to handle the ever-growing size of single-cell and spatial-omics data, making biological research faster and more efficient.
About the scientist
Prof. Dr. Dr. Fabian Theis, Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and Chair of Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems at the Technical University of Munich.
