tranSMART Foundation Launches Version 1.2 Of Its Open-source Knowledge Management Platform For Life Science Research

Wakefield, Massachusetts – September 9, 2014 – The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data, today announced the release of tranSMART Version 1.2.  Incorporating functionality developed and tested by several hundred community members from around the globe, this version offers extensions in analytics and analysis, data loading, search and retrieval as well as improved developer tools and interfaces that facilitate the addition of new  features in the future.

“tranSMART Version 1.2 is the culmination of a more than nine-month development and testing effort that began last November at the Foundation’s Annual Meeting in Paris and continued through a series of community Hackathons and Testathons, as well as a community-driven testing and optimization process,” said tranSMART Foundation CEO Keith Elliston. “I am extremely proud of what the community has accomplished this year and look forward to the broad adoption of this platform across academia and industry to more effectively turn scientific discoveries into medical breakthroughs.”

tranSMART Version 1.2 incorporates functionality developed and contributed to a single, open-source codebase with support for both PostgreSQL and Oracle.  Community and member organizations contributed new features such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS), integration with the R statistical platform, cross study analysis, new data types, and new search and browse tools.  This release, for the first time, provides the capability to integrate a number of different profiling data, such as mRNA, microRNA, and metabolomic, with genetic data based on individual patients.  The connectors to commercial analytical platforms, such as OmicSoft and GeneData, as well as R, provide unprecedented analytical flexibility and statistical rigor.  tranSMART Version 1.2 makes a giant step forward to becoming a true data management platform with the availability of browse and search capabilities.  All future enhancements to the platform will be based on this new version.

“Version 1.2 features, such as R integration and cross study analysis are truly giant steps for tranSMART, addressing the most important needs of tranSMART users at Pfizer and in the broader community and indicating the shift from data platform towards robust analytic environment,” said Jay Bergeron, director, Translational and Bioinformatics at Pfizer and scientific coordinator for eTRIKS.

The community-driven effort to integrate key functions into a seamless platform was accomplished by all of the contributors working together as a team.  These contributors include the following organizations:

• Non-profit and Academia: IMI projects (EMIF, eTRIKS, OncoTrack), CTMM TraIT, the University of Michigan, Imperial College London, and Harvard University.
• Commercial Providers: BT Global, The Hyve, Rancho Biosciences, ConvergeHEALTH, Cognizant, Thomson Reuters, and IDBS.
• Pharmaceutical Companies: Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Sanofi and Takeda.

More information on the release of tranSMART Version 1.2, as well as a public demo version can be found at: https://wiki.transmartfoundation.org/display/TSMTGPL/Version+1.2+Release.