New International Neurobiology Partnerships

Sage Bionetworks has built a strong program in neuroscience with partnerships to build advanced computational models of disease with CHDI Foundation and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. The analyses and the resulting models will be deposited in the Sage Bionetworks repository and will be valuable public resources available to all interested researchers.

Huntington’s Disease

CHDI Foundation is continuing to support Sage Bionetworks in a project to apply advanced computational modeling to the discovery and development of biomarkers and therapies for Huntington’s disease (HD). Initially, Sage Bionetworks and CHDI will work with Massachusetts General Hospital colleagues to conduct a worldwide inventory of HD tissues available for research purposes.

“Even though HD is caused by mutations in a single gene, there are unexplained variations in disease onset and progression,” explained Jonathan Derry PhD, Project Leader and Vice President of Research at Sage Bionetworks. ”We believe that genomic network analysis that uses both genetic and phenotypic data will help identify the factors underlying this complexity and provide insights into new models and therapies for the disease.” Robi Blumenstein, President of CHDI Management said, “We are particularly excited to bring HD to Sage Bionetworks’ open-access infrastructure. This shared platform will allow investigators to freely build and compare their network models using Sage Bionetworks’ sophisticated tools, to the benefit of the entire HD research community.”

Schizophrenia and other CNS Diseases

Takeda Pharmaceutical Company and Sage Bionetworks have began a four-year research alliance focusing on therapeutic targets for central nervous system (CNS) disease. Using its integrated genomics methods, Sage Bionetworks scientists will build predictive computational models and identify key regulatory genes and predictive biomarkers in patients with CNS diseases including schizophrenia. Scientists at the two companies will then collaborate to discover and prioritize the targets holding the greatest potential for molecular intervention. Under the terms of the agreement, Takeda will provide more than $3.6 million over four years in research funding and fees.

“Sage Bionetworks’ leading-edge technology and world-wide reach offers the potential for Takeda to understand currently unknown disease mechanisms. This represents a key strategy for meeting Takeda’s challenge for innovation,” said Dr. Paul Chapman, General Manager, Head of Pharmaceutical Research Division of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited. Dr. Stephen Friend, President of Sage Bionetworks noted, “We believe this project, which is our first in central nervous system area, creates an opportunity for new therapeutic insights.”

30 March 2011 Press release

New Oncology Partnership with AstraZeneca

Sage Bionetworks and AstraZeneca have begun an exciting cancer collaboration using advanced computational modeling. The goal is to develop a deeper understanding of cancer to help better match patients with appropriate treatments and might one day lead to new cancer therapeutics.

Cancer is a major cause of mortality globally; accounting for 7.4 million (or 13%) of all deaths in 2004. The World Health Organization estimates the incidence of cancer to continue rising to reach an estimated 9.2 million deaths in 2015, driving the critical need for novel therapies to reach patients quickly and efficiently as well as better ways to match patients with treatments.

The partnership will combine Sage Bionetworks’ expertise in computer models of disease genetics with AstraZeneca’s extensive knowledge and expertise of oncology including access to data on AstraZeneca’s compounds.  It will focus on investigating regulatory pathways among different cancers using large coherent cancer genomic datasets and predictive disease models developed at Sage Bionetworks. This will potentially provide data-driven rationales for prioritizing therapeutic targets for developing new insights to improve cancer treatments, as well as potentially helping to identify cancer patient subpopulations that will most likely benefit from such treatments. Dr. Jonathan Derry, Vice President of Research at Sage Bionetworks noted, “This is an exciting opportunity to combine what we have learned about complex genetic networks with the outstanding resources and scientists at AstraZeneca.”

Dr. Susan Galbraith, Vice President and Head of Oncology Innovative Medicines Unit at AstraZeneca said: “We are looking forward to collaborating with Sage Bionetworks to build realistic, predictive models of cancers to expand our current understanding of these diseases and potentially harness that knowledge into new target identification, portfolio positioning and patient selection all of which we hope will lead to new treatment options for patients.”

“Everyone truly wins in this project,” noted Dr. Stephen Friend, President of Sage Bionetworks. “Sage Bionetworks gets to work with an industry innovator and the resultant computational models will be placed in our public repository and available to all researchers following the completion of the project. Most importantly, we hope patients will gain better drugs.”

18 March 2011 Press Release

Trial by Twitter

“Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react.”

In case you missed it; Apoorva Mandavilli has a thoughtful article in Nature on the sometimes difficult transition scientists and publishers have to the rapid and very public criticism of and debate on scientific papers in social media.

Highlighting the need for new cultural norms, the article notes “For many researchers, the pace and tone of this online review can be intimidating — and can sometimes feel like an attack. How are authors supposed to respond to critiques coming from all directions? Should they even respond at all? Or should they confine their replies to the conventional, more deliberative realm of conferences and journals? “The speed of communication is ahead of the sheer time needed to think and get in the lab and work,” said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a post-doctoral fellow at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Mountain View, California, and the lead author on the arsenic paper. Aptly enough, she circulated that comment as a tweet on Twitter, which is used by many scientists to call attention to longer articles and blog posts.”

Establishing a ‘TCP/IP’ for Human Biology

Why Can’t We Just Share all
Genomics and Clinical Data?

A Summit on Human Data Interoperability

Join us for an exciting discussion about emerging opportunities to develop tools and infrastructure to collate, share, and mine human genomic/clinical data.  Participants from Sage Bionetworks, DARPA/DSO, Stanford University, Columbia University, Creative Commons, Clinical Semantics Group, and UCSF.

Monday January 31st, 2011, 11:30 AM – 4:45 PM     Lunch Provided

Pelton Auditorium, Weintraub Building, Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle WA

Background: We are undergoing a revolution in the understanding of human disease and physiology that will have a profound impact on our whole civilization.  This transformation is driven by an explosion of genomic/clinical data from emerging technologies but faces substantial challenges and barriers.  Research groups around the US and the world are currently unable to reliably; 1) store, manage, access, transfer, and organize biomedical data in ways that facilitate data mining, 2) optimally integrate the genomic data with other types of molecular and higher order data to get at the most predictive models, and 3) couple the rich molecular data sources with electronic medical records, which can provide detailed clinical information critical to getting to actionable results.  A primary cause of these deficiencies is a lack of effective methods for these tasks.

PLEASE RSVP or for more information contact: warmoth@sagebase.org
Attendance Limited to the first 150

Summit Agenda and Introduction: http://bit.ly/i96S8S

2011 Sage Bionetworks Commons Congress

Preparations are underway for the next Sage Bionetworks Congress which will be held April 15-16, 2011 in San Francisco. Our theme for the coming year is the move towards personalized, patient-driven medicine, and the role that Sage Bionetworks can play in that transition. There will be reports from the Sage Bionetworks Federation, Working Groups, and exciting projects like SageCite, as well as hackathons, poster sessions, and evening activities.

The Congress Announcement page contains information on the “attendance criteria”; this year we are asking potential attendees to indicate how they are working to build a commons, whether in data, technology, science, policy, advocacy or more. We really want this meeting to be one in which everyone has a stake, and has worked to make a more open approach to science a reality. We expect significant demand for about 250 seats so if you’d like to attend please register your interest soon.