An “open-source” approach to accelerating human health advances is the common theme among a diverse group of medical science projects that have won six science awards honoring “excellence in participant-centered research” - a rapidly emerging field that aims to turn patients and healthy people into more active and more data-sharing participants in medical research. The awards will be given out at Harvard Medical School in Boston on April 25 at a scientific convening called GET Conference (“GET” stands for “Genomes, Environments, Traits”). “The winners of the GETy Awards are at the forefront of a research revolution that will radically accelerate the rate of human health advances,” says Jason Bobe, organizer of the GET Conference, and Executive Director of the nonprofit PersonalGenomes.org.
Broad Institute
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Antibiotics Given to Babies May Change Their Gut Microbes for Years
Babies born by caesarean section, as well as those given antibiotics early in life, have a different balance of gut microbes than other babies, two new studies show. These differences could put them at higher risk for various health problems in childhood, including asthma, type 1 diabetes, and perhaps even autism. By the time children are 3 years old, their microbiomes are largely stable, said Dr. Ramnik Xavier, a lead author on one of two related studies published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine. So what happens early in life can have long-term implications for health...
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Broad Institute and Verily partner with Microsoft to accelerate the next generation of the open source Terra platform for health and life science research
On Monday, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Verily, an Alphabet company, and Microsoft Corp. announced a strategic partnership to accelerate new innovations in biomedicine through the Terra platform. Terra, originally developed by Verily and the Broad Institute, is a secure, scalable, open-source platform for biomedical researchers to access data, run analysis tools and collaborate. Terra is actively used by thousands of researchers every month to analyze data from millions of participants in important scientific research projects.
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HIMSS16: Cloudera Demos Open Source Precision Medicine and Healthcare Enterprise Data Hub
As the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2016 theme implies -- “transforming health through IT” -- healthcare organizations are increasingly focused on taking advantage of big data to personalize the patient experience and improve clinical outcomes. Cloudera’s commitment to this effort was exemplified this morning, when the company annunced its contributions to President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI). By implementing Cloudera Enterprise, healthcare organizations are better equipped to deliver precision medicine with a modern data platform that facilitates information sharing across silos while remaining HIPAA-compliant...
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Open Source in the Worldwide COVID-19 Response
February marks the celebration of creation of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in 1998. OSI created the standard definition of the term Open Source that helped guide many of LPI's initiatives today. Through the past year, open source provided many opportunities to organizations to continue to work, implement their projects, and continue reaching out to communities. Here are just a few examples of how open source provides opportunities through the face of COVID-19. The COVID-19 crisis brought out all the creativity of the open source movement. In every area of innovation--open source software, open data, open collaboration, and even open equipment--companies and research institutes have addressed medical and public health needs quickly. This article highlights some of the initiatives in each area.
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Regarding Open Source, Security, and Cloud Migration, Old Prejudices Die Hard in Health Care
Although the health care industry has made great strides in health IT, large numbers of providers remain slow to reap the benefits of a “digital transformation”. Health care organizations focus on what they get paid for and neglect other practices that would improve care and security. At conferences and meetings year and after year, I have to listen to health care leaders tediously explode the same myths and explain the same principles over and over. In this article I'll concentrate on the recent EXPO.health conference, put on in Boston by John Lynn's Healthcare Scene, where the topics of free and open source EHRs, security, and cloud migration got mired down in rather elementary discussions.
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Significant Distortions Discovered in Leading Genetics Study Method - Open Source Software can Detect and Correct Them
Many conclusions drawn from a common approach to the study of human genetics could be distorted because of a previously overlooked phenomenon, according to researchers at the Department of Genetics and Genomics Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and collaborators from Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute. Their conclusions and a unique method they developed to help correct for this distortion were recently published in Nature Genetics.
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