News

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has launched the “COVID-19 TOPx” technology sprint to develop digital solutions for the effective collection and reporting of COVID-19 diagnostics data. Data scientists, cancer researchers, and the greater public may provide feedback on these solutions in a live virtual demo on April 1, 2021.

On November 30, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration’s precisionFDA launched the COVID-19 Precision Immunology App-a-thon. Participants will develop applications and pipelines to illuminate the relationship between personalized, adaptive immunity molecular data and COVID-19 disease variables. The submission period is from November 30, 2020 to January 29, 2021.

Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) researchers shared the results of their first crowd-sourced NCI-CPTAC DREAM Proteogenomic Challenge. In this community-based, collaborative contest, participants developed computational algorithms to predict protein abundance and phosphoprotein levels.

To improve understanding of the risk and protective factors in the Veteran population, the VHA Innovation Ecosystem is utilizing the precisionFDA platform to call upon the public to develop machine learning and artificial intelligence models to predict health outcomes using synthetic Veteran health records.

On May 1, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) precisionFDA launched "Truth Challenge V2: Calling Variants from Short and Long Reads in Difficult-to-Map Regions." Participants may join this challenge to assess variant-calling pipeline performance on a common frame of reference consisting of difficult-to-map regions, segmental duplications, and the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC). The submission period is open until June 15, 2020.

An Ideas Lab is an intensive 5-day program for 30 participants (with a range of expertise and experience) to deepen their shared understanding of a complex challenge, redefine the problems within the challenge, and generate innovative ideas for research proposals. This Ideas Lab will focus on the creation of "digital twin technology."

Investigators with a wide variety of expertise, including, but not limited to, cancer biology, oncology, machine learning (or other AI), cancer systems biology, or mathematical modeling are encouraged to apply to attend the 2020 “Advancing Cancer Biology at the Frontiers of Machine Learning and Mechanistic Models” Innovation Lab.

The Metadata Automation DREAM Challenge is now open for registration. Using structured biomedical data files, Challenge participants will develop solutions that apply existing research data annotations to help automate the annotation of metadata fields and values.