Sage Bionetworks

See the following -

Two Years In, What Has Apple ResearchKit Accomplished?

Kate Sheridan | STAT | May 26, 2017

In March 2015, Apple promised to change the way medical research could be done. It launched ResearchKit, which could turn millions of iPhones around the world into a “powerful tool for medical research,” the company said at the time. Since then, ResearchKit — software that gives would-be app developers a library of coding to create health apps on the iPhone and Apple Watch — has spawned a number of studies: One team has used it to create an app to track Parkinson’s symptoms; another is trying out a screening protocol for autism. A third helps people inventory the moles on their skin and evaluate how they have changed over time...

Read More »

uBiome Launches First Microbiome App Using ResearchKit; Initial focus is on Relationship Between Gut Bacteria and Weight Loss

Press Release | uBiome | October 9, 2015

iPhone users can now explore their gut bacteria, and also contribute to research about the relationship between the microbiome and human body weight with the launch of a ground-breaking app launched by the microbiome-testing company uBiome, which uses the ResearchKit framework designed by Apple. The app itself is free, and the first 1,000 users will also qualify for free microbiome testing, usually priced at $89.

Read More »

What Ethical Issues Does the Precision Medicine Initiative Face?

David Raths | Healthcare Informatics | July 10, 2017

"This is the largest government study ever on its own people.” Nancy Kass, Sc.D., a professor of bioethics and public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, was talking about the Precision Medicine Initiative, now called the All of Us Research Program. Kass says she makes that bold statement deliberately and with humility, because she chairs the institutional review board (IRB) for the project, which aims to create a million-person cohort...

Read More »

Winners Announced for Crowdsourcing and Data Sharing Competition to Drive Innovation in Prostate Cancer Research

Press Release | Sage Bionetworks, Project Data Sphere Initiative, DREAM Challenges Initiative | August 27, 2015

Industry leaders in biomedical research, oncology data sharing and computational science announced the winners of an innovative research challenge for prostate cancer using previously unavailable clinical data. The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge is the first research challenge in prostate cancer to marry crowdsourcing with data sharing, paving a new way to tackle key research questions about metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), an advanced form of the disease with poor outcomes. The Challenge called upon the cancer research and computational biology community to find solutions to key open clinical research questions about mCRPC and explore innovative research and modeling approaches. The three specific questions posed were to:

Yes, You Can Reconcile The Wide Sharing Of Personal Medical Research Data With Greater Participant Control

Glynn Moody | TechDirt | March 15, 2016

Although the benefits of sharing big datasets are well-known, so are the privacy issues that can arise as a result. The tension between a desire to share information widely and the need to respect the wishes of those to whom it refers is probably most acute in the medical world. Although the hope is that aggregating health data on a large scale can provide new insights into diseases and their treatments, doing so makes issues of consent even trickier to deal with. A new study of Parkinson's disease from Sage Bionetworks, which describes itself as a "non-profit biomedical research organization," takes a particularly interesting approach. Unusually, it used an iPhone app to gather data directly from the participants...

Read More »