The tranSMART Foundation Announces New Version of the tranSMART Open Source Data Sharing Platform for the Life Sciences Community

Open Platform Enables Scientists Around the Globe to More Quickly Advance their Research

Wakefield, Mass. (PRWEB) September 16, 2013

The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source knowledge management platform for scientists to share their pre-competitive data, today announced the release of tranSMART version 1.1. Originally developed as an internal project by Johnson & Johnson, this new version of the cloud-based data sharing solution eliminates the need for user organizations to purchase commercial software and integrates significant new contributions by the developer community over the past year into one new release.

“Scientists at universities, non-profit research organizations, and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are struggling to effectively leverage the massive amounts of high-quality research data available to advance their studies,” said tranSMART Foundation co-CEO Brian Athey, Ph.D., also with the University of Michigan. “To date, we have more than 25 life science organizations utilizing the tranSMART platform to link research data with clinical data in a central repository. We envision that through this platform scientists will have the ability to effectively collaborate using pre-competitive data – facilitating quicker and more cost-effective translational medicine research.”
The Foundation’s co-CEO, Michael Braxenthaler, Ph.D., who also holds positions with Roche and the Pistoia Alliance, added, “Our goal is to create a collaborative translational research community. Our development community is focused on the Foundation’s three C’s: code, community and content. With the open tranSMART platform, we are limiting dependency on commercial software products and leveraging the expertise of the entire user community. We have an aggressive product roadmap to develop the next generation of the platform to include new interfaces and analytical functionality as well as a more modern information architecture.”   

The tranSMART Foundation is a partnership between the Pistoia Alliance, the University of Michigan and the Imperial College London with the mission to enable effective sharing, integration, standardization, and analysis of heterogeneous data from collaborative translational research by mobilizing the tranSMART open-source and open-data community.
As an open source solution, several leading U.S. and European-based academic, pharmaceutical and service provider organizations have contributed to this release through code development, quality assurance, testing, scientific data contribution, and hosting services for “demo” instances.

Please visit: http://www.transmartfoundation.org/site/tm-r11-splash for access to release notes, documentation, source code, and other resources. Training and support for the user community is provided by the tranSMART Foundation, as well its network of service providers.   

About The tranSMART Foundation
The tranSMART Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides an open-source, cloud-based, data-sharing and analysis platform that enables scientists at universities, disease foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies around the world to share pre-competitive data in a way that saves money and time in translating research findings into new therapies and diagnostic tools. Founded to steward the tranSMART platform, the Foundation is led by the Pistoia Alliance, University of Michigan and Imperial College London. Headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts and with Centers of Excellence in Ann Arbor, Mich.; London, England; Boston, Mass.; and Amsterdam, Netherlands, the tranSMART Foundation can also be found on the web at http://www.tranSMARTFoundation.org.