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'Sandbox For Geeks' Powers Open Medical Research

Alex Woodie | Datanami | July 10, 2013

The people behind Sage Bionetworks hope that a new community-driven approach to research that features a big pool of scientific data that is open to all--or a "sandbox for geeks" as its founder put it--will result in progress being made in the battles against diseases such as arthritis, Alzheimer's, and breast cancer. Read More »

Sage Bionetworks Advocates for Open Systems in Health Research

Press Release | Sage Bionetworks, mPower | July 20, 2016

Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, continues its work to redefine the way in which health data is gathered, shared and used through the use of open systems, incentives and norms. In a Nature commentary published today, a set of governing principles for digital health data analysis that are designed to maximize the contribution of large-scale digital data to advancing medical care are described. This commentary was co-authored by John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks and Eric Topol, MD, Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, and Chief Academic Officer of Scripps Health. The two work together on the NIH-funded Precision Medicine Initiative that was announced earlier this month.

Sage Bionetworks Releases First-of-its-Kind Data from Parkinson’s iPhone Study

Press Release | Sage Bionetworks, mPower | March 3, 2016

Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit biomedical research organization, today released an unparalleled dataset that captures the everyday experiences of more than 9,500 people to help speed scientific progress toward treatments for people with Parkinson’s disease. The dataset, which consists of millions of data points collected on a nearly-continuous basis through the iPhone app mPower, will provide researchers with unprecedented insight into the daily changes in symptoms and effects of medication for people with Parkinson’s.

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Sage Commons Congress 2012

Matthew Todd | Intermolecular | April 24, 2012

I was at the Sage Commons Congress the last few days. Meetings should be full of challenging new ideas and full of spontaneous discussion. [...] This congress was very interesting, driven by the passion of those people taking part to do science in new ways. Read More »

Sequencing, cloud computing, and analytics meet around genetics and pharma Bio-IT World Shows What is Possible and What Is Being Accomplished

Bio-IT World shows what is possible and what is being accomplished...last week I took the subway downtown and crossed the two wind- and rain-whipped bridges that the city of Boston built to connect to the World Trade Center. I mingled for a day with attendees and exhibitors to find what data-related challenges they’re facing and what the latest solutions are. Here are some of the major themes I turned up...

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Winners Announced for Crowdsourcing and Data Sharing Competition to Drive Innovation in Prostate Cancer Research

Press Release | Sage Bionetworks, Project Data Sphere Initiative, DREAM Challenges Initiative | August 27, 2015

Industry leaders in biomedical research, oncology data sharing and computational science announced the winners of an innovative research challenge for prostate cancer using previously unavailable clinical data. The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge is the first research challenge in prostate cancer to marry crowdsourcing with data sharing, paving a new way to tackle key research questions about metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), an advanced form of the disease with poor outcomes. The Challenge called upon the cancer research and computational biology community to find solutions to key open clinical research questions about mCRPC and explore innovative research and modeling approaches. The three specific questions posed were to:

Yes, You Can Reconcile The Wide Sharing Of Personal Medical Research Data With Greater Participant Control

Glynn Moody | TechDirt | March 15, 2016

Although the benefits of sharing big datasets are well-known, so are the privacy issues that can arise as a result. The tension between a desire to share information widely and the need to respect the wishes of those to whom it refers is probably most acute in the medical world. Although the hope is that aggregating health data on a large scale can provide new insights into diseases and their treatments, doing so makes issues of consent even trickier to deal with. A new study of Parkinson's disease from Sage Bionetworks, which describes itself as a "non-profit biomedical research organization," takes a particularly interesting approach. Unusually, it used an iPhone app to gather data directly from the participants...

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