The Intellectual Property and Science business of Thomson Reuters, announced on the 12 July 2013 their collaboration with One Mind for Research to further the understanding of the central nervous system (CNS) and traumatic brain injuries through tranSMART, an open source data sharing and analytics platform supported by the tranSMART Foundation.
According to the company, One Mind is working with Thomson Reuters to implement tranSMART, to support the scientific community’s need to share data, collaborate to improve diagnostics and discover more effective treatments for patients suffering from CNS- and traumatic brain injury-related diseases. In the first stages of the project, the Thomson Reuters Life Sciences Professional Services team provided data curation and analysis for preparing and uploading traumatic brain injury clinical data, performing preliminary data analyses and designing a workflow driven by clinical terminology, according to a press release.
It is expected that in the next stage, the Thomson Reuters team will provide a broad spectrum of services to assist One Mind and its partners in using the platform as part of the One Mind Portal, including advanced bioinformatics analysis of the molecular data generated in traumatic brain injury, clinical trials and a customisation of tranSMART for an organisation’s information portals. According to the press release, the companies intend to continue the relationship in the future for the development of the “Apollo Program,” the One Mind Brain Data Exchange Portal.
“Web platforms like tranSMART are essential in advancing the work of our community’s researchers, but there are many challenges in constructing and maintaining this type of tool and having it work in unison with the One Mind Portal in development,” said Magali Haas, chief science and technology officer of One Mind for Research.
TranSMART, according to the company, is specifically designed to be an environment where life scientists and bioinformaticians can store patient data and correlate it with phenotypic data of clinical relevance, such as disease subtypes, drug response and survival expectancy. Researchers are expected to be able to use the platform to generate hypotheses on efficacy and toxicity biomarkers, novel drug targets, patient stratification for clinical trials, and other clinical applications.
Image courtesy of Reuters/Michael Dalde.
