By Bio-IT World Staff
April 8, 2010 | Sage Bionetworks has received a $5m grant from the Washington Life Science Discovery Fund (LSDF) to establish a novel program to apply advanced computational modeling to the discovery and development of disease therapies.
“The new program will both benefit from, and help strengthen, the growing community of researchers in Washington working across traditional boundaries to build and use predictive disease models," said Stephen Friend, President of Sage Bionetworks in a press release.
The Program is entitled “Sage Integrative Bionetwork Community: Scalable Resource for the State of Washington” and has two main objectives: The Program will build and deploy a Network Data Management System, an important facet of the Sage Commons, that will be a repository of genetic data, tools and computational models of disease for medical researchers and biotechnology companies. The second goal is to establish the Washington Partners Program (WPP) an outreach initiative with specialized interface teams, working with academic and commercial groups, to increase the speed and success of their internal projects.
The LSDF support will enable Sage to add dedicated software engineers and systems biologists to its growing team of network and computational biologists located on the campus of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.