The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has made its precisionFDA Web platform publicly available, according to a post published to the FDAVoice blog.
Unveiled last month as part of a "closed beta," the platform would "supply an environment where the community can test, pilot, and validate new approaches" to next-generation sequencing tests, FierceHealthIT previously reported.
The precisionFDA platform is a part of this larger effort and will include tools such as "Genome in the Bottle," a reference sample developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Taha A. Kass-Hout, M.D., the agency's chief health informatics officer and director of FDA's Office of Health Informatics, and Elaine Johanson, the precisionFDA project manager, write in the post.
Scientists also will be able to compare their results to previously validated reference results, share their results with others, track changes and obtain feedback. In addition, the FDA plans to improve the transparency and usefulness of precisionFDA by opening the code up on the open source software repository, GitHub, to further engage the open source community of developers.
Built using agile development processes, the platform uses the same concepts at OpenFDA, which uses application programming interfaces to make FDA data sets publicly available to third-party application developers. The project was conceived as a crowd-sourced, cloud-based community that's part of President Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative.
The agency unveiled the OpenFDA API in July 2014 as a new way to access FDA data that it previously made available through an RSS feed, a Flickr stream and a search interface.
To learn more:
- read the blog post