Indoc Research evolved from the Ontario Cancer Biomarker Network (OCBN), which was established in 2005 in Toronto, Canada, with support from the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the Ministry of Research and Innovation. OCBN was rebranded in 2014 to Indoc Research.
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At origin, the mandate was to support cancer researchers in their search for proteomic and genomic biomarkers, including with molecular laboratory operations. Over time, this role evolved to manage data from many other diseases resulting in expansion of informatics and data management capabilities. An example is Brain-CODE, the Ontario Brain Institute’s state-of-the-art neuroinformatics platform designed to support the collection, storage, federation, sharing and analysis of different data types across several brain disorders.
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Additional use cases for other research and institutional organizations allowed the software solution to evolve with new functionalities, additional features, and regular updates. A development ecosystem approach based on an open-source model for software ensured that platforms built for one research team could be leveraged by others, reducing costs and effort for all. This culminated in “Pilot”, an open data platform deployable on compute clouds, on-premise infrastructure, or as a hybrid. Pilot allows making research data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and supports data federation across multiple centers and enables data discovery while complying with data residency requirements.
Importantly, licensing of PILOT, the core data platform software, remained protected by the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3), which prevents using the open-source code as part of closed-source proprietary products and ensures that parties contribute back to the open source (“copy-left”), even when running the software as a service in the cloud.
In 2020 Indoc Research, based on its experience with data platforms, won tenders issued by the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, to support the development of the Virtual Brain Cloud and to coordinate the Virtual Research Environment (VRE) architecture development. While these activities were ongoing, Indoc Research Europe was launched in 2021 as a not-for-profit affiliate based in Germany.
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Work on the second phase of the VRE project was completed in December 2022. This customization to Charité’s IT infrastructure was made available under an EUPL-1.2 license, a copy-left license specifically governed by the law of the European Union, thus at that point forking an early version of the Indoc Pilot data platform software constituting the base for the VRE data platform, and branching it off from the continued evolution of Pilot.
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Indoc Research Europe partnered within the overall scope of the Human Brain Project in a consortium led by Charité to build Health Data Cloud (HDC) within the EBRAINS research infrastructure, a project that ran from October 2022 to September 2023. ​Working with a multinational team of academic and industrial partners, Indoc supported the development of a HDC central node that leveraged evolved Pilot software to enable neuroscience researchers to collect, process, and share sensitive data according to GDPR requirements.​ The HDC central node is a further customization of the Indoc Pilot data platform software [called “Pilot HDC”], with completion of the development and deployment of version 1.0.0 on the EBRAINS research infrastructure on September 30, 2023.
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In the ongoing eBRAINS-Health project, running for 4 years from July 2022 to June 2026 under consortium leadership by Charité, Indoc Research Europe leads the continued development and technical coordination of the Pilot-HDC platform to enable simulating some of the brain’s complex neurobiological phenomena and to allow researchers to collate an array of different types of information including data from PET and MRI scans, EEG tests, behavioural studies and lifestyle surveys, as well as clinical data from thousands of patients and healthy controls.​ As in the HealthDataCloud project, the output will be available as open-source under an AGPLv3 license.
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In 2023, Indoc spun-out a new for-profit entity, Indoc Systems, focused on commercialization of Indoc’s SaaS data management platform - Pilot. Indoc Research as a not-for-profit organization continues to focus on nucleating and growing multi-disciplinary data partnerships and associated analytics activities and to provide research software engineering services in support of academic projects.
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