In January 2025, we shared that we’ve been reimagining how research will be done in the next five to ten years and outlined some of our plans for future capabilities. Since then, we’ve been working closely with Manifold on a major upgrade to Terra—“Terra Powered by Manifold”—and we’re excited to share an update.
As a reminder, we won’t make any sudden changes to how your day-to-day work happens! We’ll share our timelines and give you a heads up on any user interface and functionality changes well in advance as we roll out the next-gen upgrades.
Platform capabilities coming soon
- AWS support: Since a lot of the life sciences industry is on AWS, we have partnered closely with AWS to enable seamless data access and collaboration within an organization’s AWS cloud environments, and to enable taking advantage of the latest AWS services.
- NextFlow support: Robust NextFlow pipelines that feature low-code workflow configuration, integration of community workflows, and comprehensive logging and debugging capabilities.
- AI agents: AI agents that empower scientists to go faster with their data and tools, starting with a dataset chat and cohort building agents, and then looking ahead to an extensible ecosystem where the community can develop and deploy their own specialized agents to address unique research challenges.
Tools & datasets coming soon
- Popular data science tools including CellDega, Imputation Services, and PRS developed at Broad—and not easily accessible on Terra today—will be coming soon as scientific apps on the platform.
- Controlled datasets hosted by Broad on behalf of the NIH and others, previously not accessible on AWS, will be available to a broader range of researchers who are authorized to access them.
As a recap, Manifold is focused on maintaining and upgrading the core technology platform. Broad’s Data Sciences Platform (DSP) is building the next generation of scientific tools that will be made available to everyone via the platform. As part of the partnership with Manifold, members of the DSP team operating the original Terra platform have moved to Manifold while retaining their Broad access and collaborations. This team will focus on maintaining Terra while creating the next generation platform. This strategic step enables us to accelerate the pace at which the expanded platform capabilities, tools, and datasets become available to the Terra user community and for portals powered by Terra.
Thank you for making Terra a critical tool in so many groundbreaking projects. We’re excited to continue working with you to accelerate your science!
