Microsoft has joined hands with Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Verily, an Alphabet company, to accelerate the next generation of the Terra platform for health and life science research.

Terra, originally developed by Verily and the Broad Institute, is an open-source platform for biomedical researchers to access data, run analysis tools and collaborate.

The new partnership aims to bring together Microsoft’s cloud, data and AI technologies, and global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners to accelerate development of global biomedical research through the Terra platform.

Through the collaboration with Microsoft, the companies will accelerate Terra’s vision for health and life sciences research by expanding on Terra’s open, modular and interoperable research platform, with the addition of the Microsoft Azure cloud, data and AI technologies.

The partnership will enable secure and authenticated access to distributed data stores via collaborative workspaces; allow access to open and proprietary standards-based tools, best practices workflows and APIs; and enable federated data analysis to uncover insights and build analytical and predictive models.