DREAM and Sage Bionetworks tap the wisdom of the crowd to impact breast cancer prognosis

ABOUT THE DREAM PROJECT The Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods Project (DREAM Project), founded in 2006 by Andrea Califano (Columbia University) and Gustavo Stolovitzky (IBM), was originally conceived as an initiative to advance thenascent field of network biology through the organization of Challenges on network reconstruction and pathway inference. Since the first set of network inference challenges of 2007 (DREAM2) the concept of using collaborative-competitions as a vehicle to carry on a meaningful dialogue in the computational biology community has evolved significantly. In 2012, thelast DREAM7 project featured four powerful challenges of which one was on network biology and the other three dealt with three important problems in translational medicine. With the experience gathered by the launching of 24successful challenges over the past five years, the “Challenge” concept has reached a status of legitimacy and maturity. The DREAM Challenges have brought rigor in the process of verification of computational methods, have enabled the democratization of different kinds of biological data, and have facilitated the collaboration of dozens of research teams. This success has triggered considerable interest by different government institutions and private organizations in working with DREAM to engage distributed teams to solve tough computational problems in biomedical research. ABOUT SAGE BIONETWORKS Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization, founded in 2009, with a vision to promote innovations in personalized medicine by enabling acommunity-based approach to scientific inquiries and discoveries. Sage Bionetworks strives to activate patients and to incentivize scientists, funders and researchers to work in fundamentally new ways in order to shape research, accelerate access to knowledge and transform human health. It is located on the campus of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington and is supported through a portfolio of philanthropic donations, competitive research grants, and commercial partnerships. More information is availableat www.sagebase.ort. Media Contacts: Stephen Friend
Sage Bionetworks
Tel: 206-667-2101
Email: friend@sagebase.eu Gustavo Stolovitzky
IBM-DREAM
Tel: 914-945-1292
Email: gustavo@us.ibm.com Dimitris Anastassiou
Columbia University
Tel: 201-658-9913
Email: da8@columbia.edu Karyn Margolis
Avon Foundation for Women
Tel: 212-282-5666
Email: Karyn.margolis@avonfoundation.org Jennifer Anderson
Communications Officer
Science Press Package
AAAS Office of Public Programs
Phone: 202-326-6466
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