Gathering a Health Care Industry Around an Open Source Solution: the Success of tranSMART

The critical software driving web sites, cloud computing, and other parts of our infrastructure are open source: free to download, change, and share. The role of open source software in healthcare is relatively hidden and uncelebrated, but organizations such as the tranSMART Foundation prove that it is making headway behind the scenes. tranSMART won three awards at the recent Bio‐IT World conference, including Best in Show.

The tranSMART Foundation is a non‐profit organization that develops creates software for translational research, performing tasks such as searching for patterns in genomes and how they are linked to clinical outcomes. Like most of the sustainable, highly successful open source projects, tranSMART avoids hiring programmers to do the work itself, but fosters a sense of community by coordinating more than 100 developers from the companies who benefit from the software.

I talked recently to Keith Elliston, CEO of the tranSMART Foundation. He explained that the tranSMART platform was first developed by Johnson & Johnson. When they realized they had a big project that other pharmaceutical companies could both benefit from and contribute to, they reached out to Pfizer, Millennium (now the Takeda Oncology Company), and Sanofi to collaborate on the development of the platform...