The Washington
Partners Program (WPP)
Accelerating Health Care Discovery
Sage Bionetworks has created the Washington Partners Program (WPP) to provide biomedical researchers with strategic and cost-effective advanced genomics analysis capabilities. Funded by the Washington Life Sciences Discovery Fund, the program is designed to accelerate academic and commercial research and improve healthcare outcomes in the state of Washington. The program features active next-generation network biology collaborations between Sage Bionetworks scientists and select biomedical research teams. Analytical efforts at Sage Bionetworks are provided at no-cost to partners. The goal is to rapidly develop partner capabilities by leveraging the analytical expertise of Sage Bionetworks' researchers and to achieve research and development goals with greater speed and success than is currently possible.
WPP projects leverage Sage Bionetworks' cutting edge knowledge and computational disease models to support partners’ research and development analysis and decision-making. Our analytical capabilities are designed to address targeted biomedical questions including the identification, analysis and prioritization of:
● Novel drug targets
● Key genes driving physiological or pharmaceutical mechanisms
● Biomarkers of disease pathology or therapeutic response
● Clinically relevant subpopulations to guide drug trials
● Strategies for repositioning drug candidates
The 2012 WPP Partners have been selected!
We are pleased to be working with the following researchers:
Dr. Soheil Meshinchi, Associate Professor at the University of Washington and Associate Member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Dr. Meshinchi will be working with Sage Bionetworks scientists on Predictive Modeling of childhood Acute Myeloid Leukemia.
Dr. Paul Livermore Auer on behalf of the Women’s Health Initiative Sequencing Project (WHISP) consortium. WHISP is a part of the Women’s Health Initiative and the NHLBI-sponsored Exome Sequencing Projects. Sage Bionetworks will be working with WHISP investigators on the identification of rare genomic variation associated with diabetes using network-based pathway analysis.
Dr. Ulrike Peters on behalf of the Genetics and Epidemiology of Colorectal Cancer Consortium (GECCO). This collaboration will focus on the integration of gene expression into genome- and exome-wide scans to identify novel genetic susceptibility variants for colorectal cancer.
Past WPP Partners include:
Yudong He and Hisham Hamadeh from the Investigative Toxicology Department at Amgen have been selected as 2011 WPP partners. This collaborative project will utilize network-based approaches to better understand the mechanisms underlying liver toxicity mediated by drug interactions with transporters and to identify a series of related biomarker candidates.
Richard Klinghoffer of Presage Biosciences will lead a 2011 WPP project that will combine the Presage platform with the power of systems biology and a world-class team of prostate cancer investigators to identify novel treatments for androgen-independent prostate cancer. Presage Biosciences enables validation of anticancer strategies in co-clinical tumor models years earlier than otherwise possible.
Brendan Stamper and Michael Cunningham of the Center of Tissue and Cell Sciences, Seattle Children’s Hospital will work with Sage Bionetworks on a 2011 WPP project to identify key genes and pathways involved in craniosynostosis, the pathologic fusion of fetal calvarial bones resulting in abnormal skull growth.
Interested in becoming a WPP partner?
WPP projects are designed to achieve completion through the efforts of one or two Sage Bionetworksanalysts within six months to one year. We encourage inquires regarding potential future collaborations. For more information on the project selection process read our previous call for proposals. Check back in late 2012 for information on the application process for 2013 partnerships.
For more information on this program or to discuss potential collaborations contact Lara Mangravite
Read more about research at Sage Bionetworks