tranSMART Foundation i2b2 Symposium Announced for June 23 at Harvard Medical School

WAKEFIELD, MA--(Marketwired - May 31, 2016) - The tranSMART Foundation, a non-profit organization providing a global, open-source knowledge management platform for scientists to share pre-competitive translational research data, today announced that it has joined forces with the Harvard Medical School (HMS) Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) to host the tranSMART Foundation i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) Symposium on June 23, 2016 at HMS.

The all-day meeting, beginning at 8:00 a.m. with registration and the program running from 8:30 a.m. -5:30 p.m., will focus on the integration between and use of the tranSMART platform for translational medicine and the i2b2 platform. The sessions will cover the use of tranSMART and i2b2 in research programs, as well as presentations by scientists and clinicians who are using both platforms in their research studies. Confirmed speakers include:

Keynotes:

• Paul Avillach, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of Pediatrics at Boston Children's Hospital; assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics, HMS; assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
• Brian Athey, Ph.D., Michael A. Savageau Collegiate professor and chair; Department of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan; professor of Psychiatry and Internal Medicine, University of Michigan Medical School
• Isaac (Zak) Kohane, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Pediatrics, HMS; Henderson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology; director, Countway Library of Medicine, HMS; co-director, Center for Biomedical Informatics, HMS

Speakers:

• Keith Elliston, Ph.D., CEO of The tranSMART Foundation
• Riccardo Bellazzi, Ph.D., chair, Centre for Health Technologies, University of Pavia, Italy; director, BMI Labs "Mario Stefanelli", Dip. Ingegneria Industriale e dell'Informazione, University of Pavia, Italy; director, LISRC Lab, IRCCS Fondazione S. Maugeri, Pavia, Italy
• Remond J.A. Fijneman, Ph.D., principal investigator, Netherlands Cancer Institute, Amsterdam
• Haiqing Li, Ph.D., staff scientist, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope
• Katherine Liao, M.D., MPH, associate physician, Brigham and Women's Hospital; assistant professor of Medicine, HMS
• Shawn Murphy, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of Neurology at MGH; associate professor, Center for Biomedical Informatics, HMS
• Rebecca (Becky) Steck, project senior manager, University of Michigan Health System

"i2b2 and tranSMART are both powerful platforms for integrating genomic and patient clinical data," said Dr. Elliston. "i2b2 offers valuable information on patients, treatments, outcomes, and much more; while the tranSMART open-source, open-data platform can handle a rich set of genomic, pathway and related information and includes or links to key algorithms and analysis tools. Together, these two systems offer the most complete suite for precision medicine studies. We believe this symposium will foster dialogue to increase the use of these tools and to improve future integration."

There is no cost to attend the symposium and lunch will be provided. To register, please click here. The event will follow the DBMI meetings: i2b2/SHRINE meeting on June 21 and Precision Medicine: Rogue Therapeutics 2016 meeting on June 22. A separate registration for these is required at this site.

About The tranSMART Foundation
The tranSMART Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides an open-source, cloud-based, data-sharing and analysis platform that enables scientists at universities, disease foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies around the world to share pre-competitive data in a way that saves money and time in translating research findings into new therapies and diagnostic tools. Founded to steward the tranSMART platform, the Foundation is headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts with Centers of Excellence in Ann Arbor, Mich.; London, England; Boston, Mass.; and Amsterdam, Netherlands. The tranSMART Foundation can also be found on the web at www.tranSMARTFoundation.org.