Amgen Ventures Invests in TileDB to Advance Their Universal Database

TileDB, Inc. a pioneering database company, announced today a strategic investment from Amgen Ventures, joining recent strategic investments from Lockheed Martin Ventures and NTT Docomo Ventures. The funding will be used to advance the vision and development of the TileDB universal database.

Today’s life sciences data analytics workflows use file formats that are designed to be downloaded, processed and reuploaded to analysis tools. Medical images, clinical records and genetic sequencing data are stored in disparate collections of millions of files on laptops, HPC clusters and cloud data warehouses and are then modified to fit into homegrown analysis tools that expect the data to match their particular schemas. As a result, the value of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies’ data is offset by high and redundant costs for data wrangling, infrastructure overhead and governance. For large datasets some analytical workflows are infeasible for lack of tools to securely integrate data and compute. In economic terms, the chain of data production, distribution and consumption in life sciences remains fragmented, costly, and time-consuming.

TileDB changes the data economics for Genomics and Healthcare. TileDB offers a universal database that uses multi-dimensional arrays to model and store any type of data on any backend (in the cloud or on-prem) and analyze it with any programming language and tool. Because arrays are the most common data structure for advanced analytics, TileDB unifies all the data types of a typical pharmaceutical company – images, tables, videos, transcript data, functional genomics, genomic variants, and flat files – all on a single platform. Secure, performant, custom analytics workflows can then be built on top of a strong foundational storage layer. This allows TileDB to offer superior performance, elastic scalability, extreme interoperability, and global-scale, secure collaboration.

TileDB includes TileDB Embedded, an open-source storage engine for arrays, and TileDB Cloud, a universal database that offers secure governance, access management, scalable compute and sharing so researchers and clinicians can easily discover and explore datasets of interest, as well as reproduce findings.

Stavros Papadopoulos, CEO and original creator of TileDB said, “The timing is perfect. Our work with leading computational biologists, geneticists and clinical experts allows companies to put forth a radical yet practical solution to accelerate reproducible science.”

About Amgen Ventures

Established in 2004 as Amgen’s Corporate Ventures Fund, Amgen Ventures identifies and invests in emerging companies and technologies to advance promising new medicines and solutions to healthcare’s biggest challenges. Globally, Amgen Ventures has strategically invested in human therapeutics and drug discovery efforts that go beyond-the molecule, such as digital health, data analytics and value-based approaches.

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