Highlights of Hope Spring/Summer 23

RESEARCH
Collaboration harnesses data to
fuel discovery
Discoveries are built on data.
But what happens when the amount of data becomes so immense
that even our most powerful computers struggle to handle it?
That’s the challenge a pair of Van Andel Institute and Grand Valley
State University scientists aim to solve — and they’ve earned a
$200,000 Data Insights grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
to do it.
The project, led by VAI Associate Professor Dr. Tim Triche, Jr., and
GVSU Assistant Professor Dr. Zachary DeBruine, addresses a
central problem in modern, data-intensive biomedical research:
how to efficiently store and analyze the massive data output from
today’s technologies in a way that allows both researchers and
citizen-scientists to unlock the insights within.
For example, scientists can now catalog the differences between
individual cells in extreme detail, illuminating variations that may
contribute to cancer, Parkinson’s and many other diseases. But
these answers are buried in vast swathes of data that must be
analyzed and stored — a task that can be tough even for highpowered
computers.
“A central problem in science today is that our ability to generate
data has outpaced our ability to analyze large, complex biological
datasets,” said Triche. “Our goal is to improve access to powerful
tools and allow exploration of the foundations of biology — how
cells determine their fate, state and function; how cells interact
with each other and their environment to produce health and
disease; and how genetic variation between and within people
influences the outcomes. By democratizing these tools, we seek
to open up the field so that not just researchers or clinicians, but
anyone with the desire to do so, can participate.”
The project was born from the research of DeBruine, a former
postdoctoral fellow in Triche’s lab who earned his doctorate from
Van Andel Institute Graduate School. DeBruine is now an assistant
professor at Grand Valley State University’s Applied Computing
Institute, which is housed in the Padnos College of Engineering and
Computing. He also holds an adjunct position at VAI.
As part of his Ph.D. dissertation, DeBruine developed an elegant
solution that repackages data files that are too big to run on a
single computer into a compressed form. The resulting file requires
1/10th the computational space as the original without losing
data or performance, making it much easier and faster to comb
through data. The grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will
allow Triche and DeBruine to refine and scale up this solution.
“We aim to make data analysis more accessible using simple
solutions that don’t require resource-intensive computational
pipelines or deep expertise in computer science,” DeBruine said.
“Our efforts ensure that all researchers can analyze single-cell
data. What that ultimately means is more people can work with
information in ways that could shed new light on the diseases that
impact so many.”
6 | VAN ANDEL INSTITUTE HIGHLIGHTS OF HOPE