Akaza awarded $400K SBIR grant from NIH to develop framework for clinical data sharing

September 1, 2004 - Akaza announced today that it has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a novel standards-based framework for sharing of clinical data.

The framework, called PhenoNet, will meet the need for an inter-related network of repositories and data sources that can securely share clinical data, thus aiding the conduct of multi-disciplinary research. It will do so via common data registry and a set of mature, well-defined data sharing and communications protocols.

Akaza’s CEO, Cal Collins, said of the effort, “The benefits of the PhenoNet framework closely parallel the goals of the NIH Roadmap, which identifies data sharing of this type as essential for translation of research into knowledge, products, and procedures to improve human health”.

The PhenoNet framework will be tightly integrated with Akaza’s flagship clinical data management system, Pheno. Pheno is an integrated software platform for web-based data submission, management and retrieval of clinical datasets from multi-site, multi-project clinical research studies.

Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Nitin Sawhney noted that “The architecture easily adopts relevant clinical data standards and ontologies and it tightly integrates a suite of lightweight software components”. These features will allow PhenoNet to aid cross-study data collection, meta-querying and statistical analysis, and provide for distributed management of user permissions, privacy, and regulatory compliance.

Akaza is in discussions with a number of existing clinical research networks to demonstrate successful implementations of the PhenoNet framework.

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