J&J, Roche And Others Back Tech Platform To Bolster Translational Drug Research

Pharma experts and academics have joined forces to support an existing platform for managing digital translational research data, and their efforts could boost the plodding pace of drug research. The tranSMART Foundation incorporated as a nonprofit last week to organize the open source effort, Roche's ($RHHBY) Michael Braxenthaler, who serves as co-CEO of the foundation, told FierceBiotech IT.

The tranSMART platform consists of a warehouse of molecular, phenotypic and other data types. Software already exists to search and analyze data in the warehouse, giving scientists the ability to, for instance, study correlations between genetic data and information on diseases from clinical trials. The founding members of the foundation include the pharma informatics group the Pistoia Alliance along with the University of Michigan and University College London.