Stephen Friend

Designer, Doctor, Idea generator, Inventor, Scientist, Social entrepreneur, Technologist

Dr. Friend is the President of Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit organization founded in 2009 in Seattle WA, that provides the tools and environment to conduct dynamic, large-scale collaborative biomedical research. Sage Bionetworks focuses on a world where biomedical research is about to fundamentally change. We think it will be often conducted in an open, collaborative way where teams of teams far beyond the current guilds of experts will contribute to making better, faster, relevant discoveries He is an authority in the field of cancer biology and a pioneer in the field of the genetics of gene expression, integrating system biology approaches to complex diseases. Dr. Friend believes that successful biomedical research requires the active participation from all stakeholders. He is reimagining the role of citizens in the research process and is building tools to empower them to contribute both their data and expertise as they see fit. He also believes in the importance of iteratively generating and testing novel hypotheses transparently and collaboratively. Under his leadership, Sage Bionetworks has developed an open-source technology platform, called Synapse, for data-intensive analysis, sharing and reuse, enabling researchers to perform cutting edge computational biology and research. Dr. Friend is engaging the community to crowd-source solutions to complex biomedical questions through targeted DREAM challenges. Sage Bionetworks is currently hosting open collaborative Challenges on Cancer mutation detection, Drugs for Rheumatoid Arthritis, and Alzheimer's. This past year, with funds from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Team, Sage expanded its efforts into enabling citizens to engage in building jointly with researchers, novel models of diseases including efforts in Bone Marrow Failure, Cancer Survivors, and Parkinson's Disease. Previously Dr. Friend was Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co., Inc. Formerly Dr. Friend along with Dr. Hartwell founded and co-led the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center called the Seattle Project that was an advanced institute for drug discovery and later they co-founded Rosetta Inpharmatics with investors such as Paul Allen/ Vulkan Northwest. After taking it public he sold RSTA to Merck and Co. Inc. in 2001 for more that $600M. Dr. Friend also held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995 and at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995 and the University of Washington. In 1986 he co-led the team at the Whitehead Institute at MIT that cloned the first cancer susceptibility gene. He received his M.D/Ph.D. from Indiana University. He received his MD/PhD from Indiana University. He was named a AAAS Fellow in 2009 and an Ashoka Fellow for his work at Sage Bionetworks in 2011. Currently he is on a part-time sabbatical with Francois Taddei at the CRI and working with the Curie Institut in Paris. With Francois Taddei he is working on the design of a "Wall of Questions" where the currency is data and insights" bypassing the classic role of Journals by which scientists still communicate. He and the team at Sage Bionetworks are also working on a project with Sara Riggare Ray Dorsey and DARPA on how to engage patient communities to provide objective data, sensor data, and subjective information in realtime longitudinal phenotypic studies sampling multiple times a day to develop ways to turn anecdotes about fluctuations in the symptoms among patients with Parkinson's disease into signals that might help others better understand what they can do to better control their disease.

Moving beyond current siloed medical research, instead enabling incentives that allow academic teams to share data and ideas in real time. Engaging the public in building better disease models

The ASD Tool Incubator. We still understand little about how to engage children with the Autism Spectrum Disorders. We think if there were better ways to collect personalized phenotypic data and a loop between what the child did - what they needed and what they were provided in games and mobile device engagements that such a learning loop could be valuable. We are starting up an incubator in Seattle for design and building out better tools for children with Autism Spectrum disorders. We will entirely resource this with software coders, designers who have children with ASD- taking 6 month sabbaticals to work on this project hopefully from hi tech companies by offering Awarded Fellowships selected form the talented individuals that will apply. This will be a joint program with tools builders and gamers working in both Paris and Seattle.

Building Open Collaboration Spaces, Drug Discovery and development, Network biology, Pediatrics, Social Innovation

THE RESILIENCE PROJECT: A SEARCH FOR UNEXPECTED HEROES Maybe the massive resources currently spent on studying of the sick - searching for defective components in their genomes represent an odd way to discover preventive therapies- maybe we should be looking at the well- for within this group may be unexpected heroes who just in leading apparently normal lives may hold the clues to discovering a wide spectrum on preventive and therapeutic interventions based on the concepts of resilience. The time is ripe to launch this massive project.

Taoism- Qi Chong - Poetry- Art Projects