GenoSpace Founder and CEO Receives 'Champions of Change' Award from White House -- CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

"The White House today recognized John Quackenbush, PhD, founder and Chief Executive Officer of GenoSpace, LLC, as an Open Science 'Champion of Change'. The program recognizes outstanding individuals, organizations and research projects promoting and using open scientific data and publications to accelerate progress and improve our world. GenoSpace builds information systems capable of storing and integrating genomic information and health data for clinical care and advanced research.  Kathy Giusti, founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF), was also honored as an Open Science 'Champion of Change'. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130620/NE35753LOGO ) In 2011, the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) launched the $40 million CoMMpass study, an open-science initiative that unites competitors from the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, academic institutions, and community cancer centers. The MMRF CoMMpass study will follow 1,000 patients for five years, monitoring their response to treatment and sequencing their cancer genomes to understand how they evolve under the selective pressure of drugs with which they are being treated. CoMMpass will provide unprecedented data that will be freely shared without restriction with anyone interested in using it to search for a cure. In 2012, the MMRF turned to GenoSpace to solve the problem of making the data emerging from CoMMpass available, accessible, and useful to research community. GenoSpace for Research™, which enables the MMRF Researcher Gateway, is a revolutionary software system that integrates complex data and provides collaborating scientists with advanced analytical and visualization tools that drive discovery. The MMRF Researcher Gateway is currently open to the pharmaceutical sponsors of CoMMpass, and will be made available to the public in September of this year. 'We are very proud to have partnered with the MMRF and to be honored with them by the White House,' said Quackenbush. 'This award recognizes the groundbreaking work the team at GenoSpace has done in creating tools to support the next generation of genomic research and personalized medicine.'"