 | |
| Formation | 2009 |
|---|---|
| Founder | |
| Type | Non-profit organization |
| Purpose | |
| Headquarters | Seattle, WA |
| Location |
|
President and CEO | Luca Foschini |
| Kim Baggett | |
Director | Anna Greenwood |
Vice President | Christine Suver |
| |
| Affiliations | Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center |
| Website | www |
Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit organization in Seattle that promotes open science and patient engagement in the research process. It is led by Luca Foschini. [1] It was co-founded by Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt. [2] [3]
Sage Bionetworks is notable for being an early advocate of open science. [4] [5] The company operates a software platform for collaborative data analysis called Synapse [6] that allows researchers to work together on data curation and computational modeling asynchronously in a manner inspired by GitHub. Synapse also serves as the software infrastructure for running computational challenges. [7] Sage is also developing a citizen-science platform called Bridge. [8] [9]
The bulk of Sage's scientific results emerge from cancer and neurosciences, with notable contributions to the Cancer Genome Atlas Pan-Cancer project. [10] Another Sage initiative, The Resilience Project [11] describes itself as a search for individuals who have genetic changes expected to cause severe illness but who remain perfectly healthy. The hope is to yield insight into factors that protect these individuals from disease. [12] [13] In 2019 Sage Bionetworks has joined Open-AD Drug Discovery Center, which aims to find new Alzheimer's drugs. “This project stitches together open science approaches in computational and experimental research,” Sage president Dr. Lara Mangravite said in a statement. [14]
Sage Bionetworks was founded in 2009 as a spinout of Merck & Co., who released software, hardware, intellectual property, and staff connected to its Rosetta Inpharmatics unit. [15] A donation from Quintiles provided early funding. [16]
In March 2011 Sage partnered with CHDI Foundation to develop computer simulations for studying Huntington's disease. At the same time Sage also announced a partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company wherein Sage would do research to identify biological targets for central nervous system diseases. [17]
In February 2013, Sage Bionetworks partnered with the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) project to provide expertise and infrastructure for DREAM Challenges on the Synapse.org platform. [18]
In September 2019, Sage announced a partnership with Cornell Tech, the University of California, San Francisco, Open mHealth and The Commons Project to develop an electronic health data management program called CommonHealth. The program would use Health Level Seven International standards for compatibility with both Apple Health and a similar app on Android devices. [19]
Toxicogenomics is a subdiscipline of pharmacology that deals with the collection, interpretation, and storage of information about gene and protein activity within a particular cell or tissue of an organism in response to exposure to toxic substances. Toxicogenomics combines toxicology with genomics or other high-throughput molecular profiling technologies such as transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Toxicogenomics endeavors to elucidate the molecular mechanisms evolved in the expression of toxicity, and to derive molecular expression patterns that predict toxicity or the genetic susceptibility to it.
Since October 2018, the Center for Global Infectious Disease Research has been part of the Seattle Children's Research Institute. At the time of the merger, CID Research had 166 scientists. Its mission was to eliminate the world's most devastating infectious diseases through leadership in scientific discovery. The organization's research labs were in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, WA. The institute's research focused on four areas of infectious disease: HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis (TB), and Emerging & Neglected Diseases (END) like African sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and toxoplasmosis. CID Research was engaged in early stages of the scientific pipeline including bench science and malaria clinical trials and has expertise in immunology, vaccinology, and drug discovery.
Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups—with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response or risk of disease. The terms personalized medicine, precision medicine, stratified medicine and P4 medicine are used interchangeably to describe this concept though some authors and organisations use these expressions separately to indicate particular nuances.
Jeffery W. Kelly is an American businessman and chemist who is on the faculty of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.
John Wilbanks is a Senior Fellow at the Datasphere Initiative, and formerly the Head of Data at Biogen Digital Health, the co-founder and Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks, Executive Director at Science Commons. He served as a Senior Fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and at FasterCures. He is known for his work on informed consent, open science and research networks. Wilbanks led a We the People petition supporting the free access of taxpayer-funded research data, which gained over 65,000 signatures. In February 2013, the White House responded, detailing a plan to freely publicize taxpayer-funded research data.
Drug repositioning involves the investigation of existing drugs for new therapeutic purposes.
Dimitris Anastassiou is an electrical engineer and Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Columbia University School of Engineering. Anastassiou's earlier work focuses primarily on signal and information processing and reverse engineering. His more recent work involves interdisciplinary research, specifically in systems biology, with investigators at Columbia University Medical Center. Anastassiou is Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to video technology, developing high-performance digital image and video coding techniques . He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and recipient of both the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award.
Computational Resources for Drug Discovery (CRDD) is one of the important silico modules of Open Source for Drug Discovery (OSDD). The CRDD web portal provides computer resources related to drug discovery on a single platform. It caters to researchers of computer-aided drug design, providing computational resources, a discussion forum, and wiki resources related to drug discovery, predicting inhibitors, and predicting the ADME-Tox properties of molecules. One of the major objectives of CRDD is to promote open source software in the field of cheminformatics and pharmacoinformatics.
GNS Healthcare (Aitia) is a biosimulation company based in Somerville, MA.
Stephen H. Friend is co-founder and director of Sage Bionetworks.
Translational bioinformatics (TBI) is a field that emerged in the 2010s to study health informatics, focused on the convergence of molecular bioinformatics, biostatistics, statistical genetics and clinical informatics. Its focus is on applying informatics methodology to the increasing amount of biomedical and genomic data to formulate knowledge and medical tools, which can be utilized by scientists, clinicians, and patients. Furthermore, it involves applying biomedical research to improve human health through the use of computer-based information system. TBI employs data mining and analyzing biomedical informatics in order to generate clinical knowledge for application. Clinical knowledge includes finding similarities in patient populations, interpreting biological information to suggest therapy treatments and predict health outcomes.
Eric Emil Schadt is an American mathematician and computational biologist. He is founder and former chief executive officer of Sema4, a patient-centered health intelligence company, and dean for precision medicine and Mount Sinai Professor in Predictive Health and Computational Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He was previously founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
In silico medicine is the application of in silico research to problems involving health and medicine. It is the direct use of computer simulation in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of a disease. More specifically, in silico medicine is characterized by modeling, simulation, and visualization of biological and medical processes in computers with the goal of simulating real biological processes in a virtual environment.
The Icahn Genomics Institute is a biomedical and genomics research institute within the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Its aim is to establish a new generation of medicines that can better treat diseases afflicting the world, including cancer, heart disease and infectious pathogens. To do this, the institute’s doctors and scientists are developing and employing new types of treatments that utilize DNA and RNA based therapies, such as CRISPR, siRNA, RNA vaccines, and CAR T cells, and searching for novel drug targets through the use of functional genomics and data science. The institute is led by Brian Brown, a leading expert in gene therapy, genetic engineering, and molecular immunology.
Andrew Kasarskis is an American biologist. He is the Chief Data Officer (CDO) at Sema4. He was previously CDO and an Executive Vice President (EVP) at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City and, before that, vice chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Co-director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Kasarskis is known for taking a network-based approach to biology and for directing the first medical school class offering students the opportunity to fully sequence and analyze their own genomes.
Scientist.com is a network of public and private e-commerce marketplaces that connect buyers and sellers of scientific research services. The company was founded in 2007 by Kevin Lustig, Chris Petersen and Andrew Martin and launched its first public research marketplace in September 2008.
SomaLogic is a protein biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics company located in Boulder, Colorado. It became listed on Nasdaq in September 2021 with a merger with the special-purpose acquisition company CM Life Sciences II, Inc.
The Resilience Project is a project, undertaken by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in collaboration with Sage Bionetworks.
Synapse.org is an open source platform for collaborative scientific data analysis. It can store data, code, results, and descriptions research work. It is operated by nonprofit organization Sage Bionetworks.
DREAM Challenges is a non-profit initiative for advancing biomedical and systems biology research via crowd-sourced competitions. Started in 2006, DREAM challenges collaborate with Sage Bionetworks to provide a platform for competitions run on the Synapse platform. Over 60 DREAM challenges have been conducted over the span of over 15 years.
