New Repository for Biotech Tools Could Boost Industry

Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit research organization, has received a $5m grant from the Washington Life Science Discovery Fund ( LSDF) to build and deploy a data management system that would give smaller companies access to some of the same tools and resources accessible to big drug companies.

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, says Stephen Friend, President of Sage Bionetworks.

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 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.

It will be a significant benefit to have access to the data previously only available to large biotech and pharmaceutical companies, said Dr. Douglas Williams, CEO of Zymogenetics. This is good for our business and many of the same benefits will accrue to academic researchers across Washington State.

The unique expertise and technology of Sage Bionetworks have enormous potential, both for advancing the work of nonprofit and commercial enterprises in Washington and for enabling the development of new approaches to diagnosis, treatment and management of disease, noted Dr. Lee Huntsman, LSDF Executive Director.

It is both exciting and humbling for a small young medical research organization such as Sage Bionetworks to receive the enthusiastic support of the Life Science Discovery Fund, added Dr. Friend. LSDF support will be an important catalyst for the long term research partnerships that will both build and benefit from the Network Data Management System and the Sage Commons.

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.