tranSMART Foundation Releases Version 16.1 of Its Open-Source, Open-Data Translational Medicine Platform

WAKEFIELD, MA--(Marketwired - Jun 28, 2016) - The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source, open-data knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data, today announced the release of tranSMART version 16.1. This version brings key enhancements to the quality and stability of the platform, a significantly improved scripted installation process and a library of more than 100 tranSMART-ready™ public datasets that can be loaded into the platform using simple included scripts. These steps significantly lower the barriers to doing state-of-the-art translational research, enabling individual investigators to install the platform for personal use on open-source Linux platforms.

The tranSMART platform is the industry leading, open-source translational research platform, providing the knowledge management and analytics required to enable precision medicine. The tranSMART Foundation has provided stewardship for the platform since it was founded in 2013, and has now designed and implemented a code governance program designed to create a commercial-quality, sustainable open-source platform.

"Downloading the platform now takes less than one hour with our new installation process and the ease and speed of importing datasets enables scientists to quickly begin new research studies -- which could even include high school students working on translational science projects," said Keith Elliston, Ph.D., CEO of The tranSMART Foundation. "Our tranSMART community continues to make great strides in enhancing the platform to meet the ever-changing needs of translational medicine research, and making these capabilities available to the broader scientific community."

The major enhancements in tranSMART 16.1 include the following:
• Streamlined Installation Procedure: Automated installation scripts now simplify the process enabling a person with basic UNIX skills to perform a new install and to import data. A typical install on a relatively fast network should now take about one hour.
• Improved Loading of 100+ Databases: Scientists can select from more than 100 databases focused on a variety of diseases and perform a simple load of the data.
• Enhanced Quality and Consistency: Significant improvements were made in the quality and consistency throughout the platform.

Until now, the installation and loading of data into the tranSMART platform was inaccessible to those without expert UNIX data management skills and a sophisticated IT infrastructure. Version 16.1 greatly simplifies the install process, and provides nearly 100 preformatted, tranSMART-ready translational datasets (representing clinical data from more than 8,000 patients, with diseases from Acute Lymphoblastic Anemia to Rheumatoid Arthritis). This version of tranSMART finally realizes the promises of open-data, democratizing the access to analysis-ready patient clinical trial data in a complete, state-of-the-art knowledge management and analytics platform.

"For this release, we also made substantial changes to the development, release governance and support processes to ensure that it is of high quality and that all the functionality works as advertised -- on both Oracle and Postgres," added Dr. Elliston. "These processes will now be implemented as standard operating procedures for all subsequent tranSMART Foundation releases. Administrators of production tranSMART platform environments are also encouraged to register for our new administrators program to receive updates, release news and other important information about current and upcoming releases."

The tranSMART roadmap includes new releases every six months, with naming that is defined by the half year of the release. Version 16.1 is the first release of 2016, and will be followed by version 16.2 in the second half of the year, which will include a number of new analytic and visualization capabilities.

About The tranSMART Foundation
The tranSMART Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides an open-source, cloud-based, data-sharing and analysis platform that enables scientists at universities, disease foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies around the world to share pre-competitive data in a way that saves money and time in translating research findings into new therapies and diagnostic tools. Founded to steward the tranSMART platform, the Foundation is headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts with Centers of Excellence in Ann Arbor, Mich.; London, England; Boston, Mass.; and Amsterdam, Netherlands. The tranSMART Foundation can also be found on the web at www.tranSMARTFoundation.org.

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