Appistry Launches CloudDx Translational from NIH Tool
By Bio-IT World Staff
January 26, 2015 | Appistry today launched Appistry CloudDx Translational, a “sister product” to the CloudDx platform launched last June, now renamed CloudDx Clinical.
CloudDx Translational is a cloud-based system for conducting patient-centered translational research. The system is designed to handle many of the same data types as CloudDx Clinical: genotype data, phenotypic data, and patient data, explained Kevin Haar, Appistry’s CEO.
But the focus for CloudDx Translational is, “very much about how you create the community of action and the community of information between clinicians that are seeing a patient and researchers that are connecting that patient to the potential disease and drugs and treatments that could be possible.”
CloudDx Translational is meant to facilitate the level of detail inherent in a research protocol, tracking tests, analyses, and a “much finer granularity of… all the data associated with a patient,” Haar said, and to create a collaborative environment between researchers and clinicians, particularly ones who may not be located in the same facility.
CloudDx Translational had its genesis at the Undiagnosed Diseases Program Integrated Collaboration System (UDPICS), developed by the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program about three years ago in conjunction with Appistry, RURO, Inc., Gene42, and Cartagenia.
CloudDx Translational is a “derivative” of NIH’s UDPICS, Haar said, and noted that Appistry continues to support some aspects of UDPICS at NIH.
A group of tools was brought together at NIH to solve problems of collaborative communication, Haar explained. “We’ve approached [the problem] in a similar way with similar partners,” he said. Appistry is working with partners as well for, “things like LIMS integration and other things, and there are some open source products that we leverage,” Haar said. “It’s a very similar implementation and extension of the work at the NIH.”
Haar continued: “We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to bring [the product] out of that specific usage environment there, and make it more widely available to research institutions around the country and really around the world.”
CloudDx Translational will be licensed to research institutions annually, with price based on the number of patients tracked by the system. Individual researchers and clinicians then have access to a cloud-based service that they interact with that provides the “community of information” they work within. Permissions and rights can be set for each user.
“We see the translational research support in CloudDX as in natural partnership with the clinical product. For institutions that have both a research component and a clinical component, a lot of them are going to start with CloudDx Translational, but we see it as a stepping stone to much broader usage of Appistry products with CloudDX Clinical.