FDA Brings PrecisionFDA Platform Online

By Bio-IT World Staff

December 15, 2015 | This morning, FDA Chief Health Informatics Officer Taha Kass-Hout and precisionFDA Project Manager Elaine Johanson announced that the precisionFDA platform is live and freely available for use. Kass-Hout spoke to Bio-IT World this August about the project, which provides an environment for creators of analysis tools for next-generation sequencing to test their pipelines and compare their results against best-in-class standards. Users can also share their pipelines with one another, contribute data or software tools to the platform, and make their notes and feedback publicly available. 

“We’re confident that employing such a collaborative approach to DNA data will yield important advances in our understanding of this fast-growing scientific field,” Kass-Hout and Johanson write in their announcement.

While the project is an open government effort, a successor to the openFDA project launched in 2014, it was built with significant contributions from industry, including major players in commercial next-generation sequencing like Illumina, Roche, and 23andMe. In particular, DNAnexus, a provider of cloud-based analysis of DNA data, was contracted to build and implement the platform. The FDA has pledged to make the software open source and available on GitHub.

Developers and researchers can now begin using precisionFDA at precision.fda.gov.