tranSMART Foundation To Present Its Open-Source Knowledge Management Platform At Bio-IT World Conference & Expo

The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data, will participate at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston, Mass. on April 29 – May 1, 2014. The transSMART foundation progrm includes a pre-conference workshop, four presentations during the Conference as well as holding a special Community Meeting on a Wednesday evening during the Conference.

“Our tranSMART platform is ideal for the life sciences community, specifically those attending the Bio-IT World Conference,” said tranSMART Foundation CEO Keith Elliston. “We see this conference as the perfect venue to increase the awareness of our platform and demonstrate how it can help scientists in academia, at disease foundations, in pharmaceutical companies, as well as at government agencies collaborate to advance translational medicine.”

On Tuesday, April 29, the tranSMART Foundation will hold a workshop on “The tranSMART Platform Today and Tomorrow” from 12:30 to 4:00 p.m. The workshop will include presentations from Dr. Elliston; Yike Guo, chief technology officer for the foundation; Sherry Cao, associate director, scientific computing at Genzyme Sanofi; Paul Avillach, M.D., Ph.D., research associate, Center for Biomedical Informatics at Countway, Harvard Medical School; Brian Athey, Ph.D., chief science officer for the Foundation; as well as from the workshop sponsors: BT Global Services, IDBS, Genedata, and Gigaspaces.

In addition to the pre-conference workshop, the following are other tranSMART Foundation-related events being held during the conference:

April 30:

• 11:00 a.m. – Michael Braxenthaler, Ph.D., global head strategic alliances, F. Hoffman-La Roche and VP of Industry Relations for The tranSMART Foundation will present on “tranSMART – A Rapidly Evolving Community-Driven Open Source Platform for Translational Research.”
• 4:00 p.m. – Peter Henstock, Ph.D., senior principal scientist, Statistics and Data Mining and Visualization, Research Business Technologies at Pfizer will be discussing “GWAVA: Genome-wide Association Visual Analyzer.”
• 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. – The tranSMART Foundation Community Meeting, hosted by ConvergeHEALTH by Deloitte.

May 1:

• 3:10 p.m. – Jay Bergeron, director, Translational and Bioinformatics, Pfizer will be giving a presentation on “The European Translational Research Information and Knowledge Management Services (eTRIKS): 18 Months into a Novel IMI Project to Support Translational Research Data Management.”
• 3:30 p.m. – Angela Guadette, business analyst, Research Business Technology at Pfizer will be speaking on “tranSMART: Enabling Rapid Exploratory Analyses and Hypothesis Generation at Pfizer.”

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 headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts 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.