Sage Bionetworks Gets $5m Grant From Washington Life Science Discovery Fund

The program entitled ‘Sage Integrative Bionetwork Community: Scalable Resource for the State of Washington’ intends to build and deploy a network data management system, that will be a repository of genetic data, tools and computational models of disease for medical researchers and biotechnology companies.

The program also plans to establish the Washington Partners Program (WPP) an outreach initiative with specialised interface teams, working with academic and commercial groups, to increase the speed and success of their internal projects.

Sage Bionetworks said that LSDF support will enable it 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.

Stephen Friend, president of Sage Bionetworks, said: “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.

“It is both exciting and humbling for a small young medical research organisation such as Sage Bionetworks to receive the enthusiastic support of the Life Science Discovery Fund. 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.”

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