Prize4Life, Sage Bionetworks and DREAM Launch an Open Science Challenge to Find Clues to Understanding Heterogeneity in Patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) | Business Wire

"Today Prize4Life (http://www.prize4life.org.il/) in partnership with Sage Bionetworks (www.sagebase.org) and the DREAM Challenges (www.dreamchallenges.org) announced the opening of the DREAM ALS Stratification Prize4Life Challenge (https://www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn2873386/wiki/), a global open science data analysis competition geared to develop more personalized approaches for the research, prognosis and treatment of ALS ... The key goal of the DREAM ALS Stratification Prize4Life Challenge (or ALS Stratification Challenge) is to identify the attributes that differentiate ALS patients. Such information will help patients and families plan accordingly to increase their quality of life and will also help guide the development of so-called stratified ALS clinical trials that could enroll specific ALS subgroups for the testing of new treatments.  The ALS Stratification Challenge will run from June to mid-September, 2015, and spur the development of quantitative solutions to stratify ALS patients based on their disease progression or survival.  Prize4Life is providing the largest open ALS clinical trials database in the world (PRO-ACT: https://nctu.partners.org/ProACT), which will serve as the basis for the Challenge. Sage Bionetworks and DREAM have created an engaging set of incentives and a cloud-based Challenge environment — called Synapse (www.synapse.org) — where Challenge participants can access and analyze the data, work alone or on teams, submit their quantitative solutions to a leaderboard for scoring against a hidden validation data set and share their ideas, code, and analysis results with others in the Challenge. IBM is donating computational resources for the Challenge and working with Sage Bionetworks to provide a cloud-based environment to empower participants with limited computational power. An exciting technical feature of this Challenge is that participants will submit their open source algorithms in a portable framework to the IBM cloud for scoring. At the end of the Challenge all of the submitted analysis methods will be available on Sage’s Synapse platform as a Challenge library and community resource that can serve as the basis of ongoing research ..."