Kevin Davies of Bio-IT World wrote the article “Running tranSMART for the Drug Development Marathon”, an overview of a translational medicine data warehouse project at Johnson & Johnson, led by Eric Perakslis, VP of R&D informatics, managed by Sándor Szalma, senior research fellow, and delivered by Recombinant during an 18-month implementation.

Davies wrote: “TranSMART helps investigators mine drug target, gene and clinical trial data to aid in predictive biomarker discovery, chiefly in immunology and oncology. Perakslis says it is an ‘amazingly advanced’ data warehouse that compares favorably with many such efforts he’s seen in the Pharma world.”

Davies highlighted the open platform approach by Recombinant: “Perakslis is currently having discussions [with Recombinant] about a Red Hat approach where a lot of the advanced analytics is made open source. ‘I’m not running a commercial software company,’ he says. He’s already offered the software to Guna Rajagopal, a colleague at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. In addition, St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, UCSF and other centers are all considering the adoption of the i2b2-based platform.”

Labels: Data Warehousing, i2b2, Open Source, Translational Research

Joel Amoussou wrote the blog post “Unlocking the Potential of Health Information Technology (HIT)”, a sensible perspective on reducing healthcare costs and improving quality through standardization, open source technology, and staff training.

Labels: Open Source

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) honored Zak Kohane yesterday with the Donald A.B. Lindberg Award for Innovation in Informatics for his work with Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2). Dr. Kohane is the director of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program and Lawrence J. Henderson Professor of Pediatrics and Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School.

Labels: i2b2