Sage Bionetworks Named One of the Two Best Global Academic Workplaces

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sage Bionetworks has been ranked #2 in The Scientist’s tenth international survey of best places to work in academia. The Scientist noted that in this year’s survey, researchers around the world said they valued the personal satisfaction their workplace offers above all else. The Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco ranked first for the second year in a row.

“This unanticipated recognition for our young endeavor illustrates the increasing importance of collective biomedical research and is reflected in the recent large number of outstanding researchers wanting to work here.”

The survey’s author Hayley Dunning noted that with fewer than 30 researchers, each with a different specialty, Sage Bionetworks is an “incubator for innovation,” quoting Senior Scientist Brian Bot, who feels that weekly interactions with software engineers as well as oncologists with direct patient contact help him put “a different spin on things.”

Sage Bionetworks is focused on changing how medical researchers and citizens collaborate on large datasets to create useful models of disease with initiatives such as Synapse, an open access analysis and collaboration platform (synapse.sagebase.org), and the DREAM breast cancer prognosis challenge (synapse.sagebase.org/#BCCOverview:0) that enables research community interaction.

Dr. Stephen Friend, President of Sage Bionetworks, remarked, “This unanticipated recognition for our young endeavor illustrates the increasing importance of collective biomedical research and is reflected in the recent large number of outstanding researchers wanting to work here.

The survey complied over 1,000 responses from full-time life scientists working in academic and non-profit research institutions around the world. Sage Bionetworks was cited as a newcomer in the top 25 institutions that included the Massachusetts General Hospital, Cleveland Clinic and Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

A New Model

“Sage Bionetworks does not follow traditional research organization models,” Stephen Friend noted. “We have an outstanding interdisciplinary team of experts working towards a common strategic goal rather than individual academic recognition.” Building from its computation biology roots, Sage Bionetworks is also increasingly working with patient advocates and communities to help build better models of disease.

Sage Bionetworks partners with a broad array of academic and commercial entities to accomplish its goals. “We have been especially fortunate to have the support of the NCI’s Integrative Cancer Biology Program and the Washington Life Sciences Discovery fund for this start-up enterprise,” Dr. Friend commented, “as well as ongoing partnerships with organizations such as IBM, Google, Amazon and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.”

About Sage Bionetworks

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization creating a new paradigm for addressing the complexity of human biological information and the treatment of disease. Sage Bionetworks and its academic and commercial partners employ global coherent molecular and clinical datasets to create validated disease models that improve the speed and efficiency of therapeutic drug development. Sage’s vision is to create an open access, integrative bionetwork evolved by contributor scientists working to eliminate human disease: www.sagebase.org.