CORRECTING and REPLACING DREAM and Sage Bionetworks Announce Big Data Challenges to Impact Biomedical and Clinical Research - WSJ.com

"DREAM and Sage Bionetworks today announced that they will run four Big Data open science Challenges between now and the fall. These open computational Challenges are a new method in biomedicine to rapidly share and evolve predictive models for important questions and were featured at today's session of the Sage Bionetworks Commons Congress taking place in San Francisco. Challenges have been used successfully in other research fields, and in the past 6 years the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) project has run 24 successful Challenges in Systems Biology. Due to efforts like DREAM, the 'Challenge' concept has reached a status of legitimacy and maturity: the NIH and private companies are investing in the Challenge model to solve complex problems. In February 2013, and based on the success of collaborating to run the 2012 Sage Bionetworks/DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge, Sage Bionetworks merged its open science efforts with those of DREAM. This year's so-called DREAM8 Challenges mark the eighth year that DREAM founder Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky has been working with his distributed group of systems biology scientists to engage wider and more diverse communities of scientists to competitively solve important problems in biomedicine. Says Stolovitzky about this year's Challenges, 'The Challenge infrastructure, computational model archive and data governance systems that Sage Bionetworks has established allows the DREAM Challenges to shift in exciting new ways. In DREAM8 and future Challenges, we will use the solutions from some Challenges to serve as seeds for subsequent Challenges and for basic and clinical validation of the models that show outstanding performance. And we are already planting the seeds for Challenges that start with citizens and patients donating their data so that we can run Challenges that answer questions that are directly relevant to their disease progression and treatment options.' The first four DREAM8 Challenges announced today will launch later this spring and be open for participation by anyone interested (signup is open at DREAM8@sagebase.org). The model submission phase will close in the fall and the Challenge winners will be announced at the DREAM8 Conference taking place in early November. Sage Bionetworks and DREAM expect to launch another round of DREAM8 Challenges in the fall. Brief information about each of the announced DREAM8 Challenges is provided below  ..."