Thursday June 20, 2013, Atul Butte, MD, PhD, a Stanford University Professor and entrepreneur is being honored at a formal ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in Washington DC. The Obama Administration is honoring Dr. Butte and several other genomics and molecular biology researchers who have focused on making large and complex sets of biological data open and widely accessible to the larger research community. Butte has been a leader in the mining of genomics data to advance the practice of personalized medicine, and is the founder of NuMedii, Inc., a start-up company in the genomics area that Claremont Creek Ventures has invested in.
Dr. Butte is receiving the Open Science Champions of Change award. The Champions of Change program was launched several years ago as part of President Obama's Winning the Future Initiative, which highlights individuals, businesses, and organizations who make positive impacts on communities. Dr. Butte is part of a group of investigators and entrepreneurs being singled out for their efforts to make open sharing of scientific data a reality, a goal that the Obama administration has promoted as a priority for enabling and enhancing scientific innovation.
“Open sharing of research results is a proven strategy for driving scientific change,” the White House said in a statement. “For example, the rapid and open sharing of genomic data from the Human Genome Project revolutionized biomedical research, and spurred major growth in the biotechnology industry.”
Butte is a pediatrician and geneticist at Stanford University and the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. He also is a founder of the genomic interpretation company Personalis, the prenatal diagnostics company Carmenta, and the drug discovery company NuMedii, which is how Claremont Creek Ventures came to be associated with him.
At NuMedii, Butte is working to commercialize technologies that he discovered at Stanford University. Based on government research rules, when the NIH and other government health research organizations provide grant money to an academic (or commercial) research project, the results must be shared in a public database. Over the years, these databases have accumulated billions of data points on clinical test results from this multitude of research projects. Whereas a single research project might only provide data on a single disease or drug, the millions of projects taken together provide an aggregate of data that can be scoured for important clinical information. This “Big Data” approach to research is the application that Numedii is focused on, and is what Dr. Butte is being honored for today.
Gini Deshpande, the CEO of NuMedii, said of the honor “We are thrilled that Atul will be highlighting NuMedii during his talk at the White House – we could not hope for a better venue to showcase our company.
The honor was first publicized by GenomeWeb on Wednesday June 19 … see copy below for those who do not have access.
About NuMedii, Inc.
Founded in 2008, NuMedii discovers new drugs by translating predictive Big Data technology into therapies with a high probability of therapeutic success. The company's Big Data technology, originally developed at Stanford and licensed exclusively to NuMedii, consists of billions of data points of ever-increasing amounts of comprehensive disease, pharmacological and clinical data. NuMedii analyzes this data to discover drug-disease connections and biomarkers that can lead to significant therapeutic advances. For more information, visit www.numedii.com.
About Claremont Creek Ventures
Claremont Creek Ventures (CCV) is a seed and early stage venture firm. The firm focuses on information technology (IT) driven opportunities where it has deep domain expertise such as digital healthcare, energy technology, payments/commerce, and online businesses. CCV builds successful companies today by staying lean, using capital efficiently, and developing great teams. Utilizing the firm's proprietary life-cycle venturing program, CCV partners with entrepreneurs and institutions, including UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Stanford University and UC Davis. Claremont Creek Ventures has more than $300 million in capital under management in two funds. For more information, visit www.claremontcreek.com.
Ted Driscoll and Brad Webb led the investment in NuMedii and are on the Board of Directors. Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the investment.
Genome Web Daily News
White House Open Science ‘Champions' Highlights Genomic Data Pioneers
June 19, 2013
By a GenomeWeb staff reporter
NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Obama Administration tomorrow will honor several genomics and molecular biology researchers who have focused on making large and complex sets of biological data open and widely accessible to the larger research community.
The list of 13 scientists who will receive the Open Science Champions of Change honor at the White House tomorrow includes seven genomic and molecular scientists including Atul Butt, David Altshuler, David Lipman, Drew Endy, John Quackenbush, Kathy Giusti, and Stephen Friend, among other investigators in a range of fields.
The Champions of Change program was launched as part of President Obama's Winning the Future Initiative, which highlights individuals, businesses, and organizations who make positive impacts on communities. This group of investigators and entrepreneurs are being singled out for their efforts to make open sharing of scientific data a reality, a goal that the Obama administration has promoted as a priority for enabling and enhancing scientific innovation.
“Open sharing of research results is a proven strategy for driving scientific change,” the White House said in a statement. “For example, the rapid and open sharing of genomic data from the Human Genome Project revolutionized biomedical research, and spurred major growth in the biotechnology industry.”
Butte is a pediatrician and geneticist at Stanford University and the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. He also is a founder of the genomic interpretation company Personalis, the prenatal diagnostics company Carmenta, and NuMedii, which searches public data to discover new drugs.
Altshuler, a founding member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and MIT, will receive the honor on behalf of the Global Alliance for Sharing Genomic and Clinical Data. He has been a lead investigator on the SNP Consortium, the International HapMap Project, and the 1,000 Genomes Project.
Lipman is founding director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information. He also launched PubMed Central to provide free electronic access to research, and he and his staff built up GenBank, the largest public DNA database in the world.
Endy, a Stanford University bioengineer, also is co-founder and president of BioBricks, a non-profit created to make biotechnology information widely available in an ethical manner. He also has supported and helped lead the iGEM.org biotechnology competition, OpenWetWare.org, a resource for sharing lab results and methods, and BIOFAB.org, a public domain factory for engineering biological parts.
Quackenbush is a professor of biostatistics and computational biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard School of Public Health. He co-founded GenoSpace, a firm that develops software for genomic data handling and analysis, and in particular created portals to support the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation's CoMMpass study.
Giusti is the founder and CEO of MMRF, which launched the CoMMpass study, which seeks to define the molecular subtypes of the disease and to place the resulting data, along with related clinical information, in an open-access platform.
Friend is president of Sage Bionetworks, which aims to redefine how complex biological data are gathered, used, and shared. He started employing large data sets and integrative systems biology approaches for studying disease in the mid-1990s.
These honorees, along with six others in various other scientific fields, will be honored by the White House at a live event tomorrow afternoon.