Stephen Friend

Stephen Friend

Friend at NightScience 2013 in Paris
Born (1953-12-10) December 10, 1953
Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.
Institutions Sage Bionetworks
Alma mater Indiana University
Notable awards White House Champion of Change (2013)
ASHOKA (2009)
Ernst & Young Healthcare Award (2001)
Website
sagebase.org

Stephen H. Friend MD PhD (born December 10, 1953) is an American physician, scientist, entrepreneur and innovator. 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. He is the president, co-founder and director of Sage Bionetworks,[1][2][3] a Seattle-based non-profit organization founded in 2009, that provides the tools and environment to conduct dynamic, large-scale biomedical research transparently and collaboratively.

Friend believes that successful biomedical research requires the active participation from all stakeholders.[4] He is reimagining the role of citizens in the research process as equal partners with researchers and is building tools to empower them to contribute both their data and expertise as they see fit. He wants to break down the cultural barriers that hamper progress in research and is a strong advocate for open science. Dr. Friend is actively engaging the community to crowd-source solutions to complex biomedical questions through targeted open DREAM analysis challenges.[5] In March 2014 Dr. Friend and Dr. Eric Schadt announced the launch of the Resilience Project, a new crowdsourced effort to understand how people with high risk of developing serious genetic diseases have stayed healthy, and possibly discover the “genetic decoder ring” that protect and prevent diseases.[6]

Previously Senior Vice-President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research at Merck & Co. Dr. Friend led Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts. Prior to that Dr. Friend co-founded Rosetta Inpharmatics with Leland H. Hartwell and Leroy Hood in 1996[7] Much of his research has focused on cancer.[1]

Education

Friend received his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy, his Ph.D. in Chemistry and his M.D. from Indiana University. He did his Pediatric residency at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and his Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He trained with Robert Weinberg at Whitehead Institute where he co-led the team that cloned the first tumor Suppressor gene in 1986.

Research career

Stephen Friend was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School from 1987 to 1995, the Massachusetts General Hospital from 1990 to 1995 and the University of Washington before joining the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as a Full Member and Chair of Pharmacology in 1995. Along with Dr. Leland H. Hartwell, Friend founded and co-led the ‘Seattle Project’, an advanced institute for drug discovery at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The Seattle Project’s purpose was to link genetics and drug discovery. While there, Drs Friend and Hartwell developed a method for examining large patterns of genes and showed that these expression patterns could provide detailed functional snapshots linking yeast and man. Their work would allow researchers to intuit cellular activity directly from data as opposed to using hypothesis-driven, narrative approaches to Biology. By 1997 the Seattle Project evolved into Rosetta Inpharmatics, a for-profit company with the same mission, co-founded with Dr. Leroy Hood. Rosetta developed cutting edge tools to generate and analyze high-dimensional functional genomics data, matching genetic variation and function to drug response. Under Dr. Friend’s leadership Rosetta became one of the first, and most successful, bioinformatics startups and was acquired by Merck in 2001. Merck integrated the Rosetta approach across the global pharmaceutical enterprise with Dr. Friend as Senior Vice President and Franchise Head for Oncology Research, leading Merck’s Basic Cancer Research efforts in the Oncology Early Discovery and Development Divisions.

Since cloning the first tumor suppressor gene, Dr. Friend identified p53 as the cause of Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, co-led the teams that developed the expression profiles that underlie the OncotypeDx and Mammaprint assays for breast cancer and led the team that developed the first HDAC inhibitor Zolinza.

In 2009 thanks to Merck’s generosity with software, data, hardware and staff, Dr. Friend and Dr. Eric Schadt co-founded Sage Bionetworks. Friend wants to create a global integrative bionetwork community where researchers are rewarded for collaborating and sharing their data, knowledge and insights. Dr. Friend is actively engaging the community to crowd-source solutions to complex biomedical questions through targeted open DREAM analysis challenges.

Dr. Friend's major research interests are: 1. Open Access Platforms for Building Disease Models 2. Bionetwork Models of Disease 3. Clinical Applications of Checkpoint Controls 4. Tumor Suppressor Genes 5. Molecular Pharmacology 6. Array Technology 7. Genomic Approaches to Drug Discovery

Recognition

Friend is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a senior advisor to the National Cancer Institute, ARC and several biotechnology companies, and a Trustee of the American Association for Cancer Research. He received multiple awards among which the Markey Cancer Foundation Research Award,[8] Ernst & Young health Care Award and was named an Ashoka Fellow by Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.[9] In 2013 he was honored as a White House Champions of Change Recipient for Open Science.[10]

About Sage Bionetworks

Sage Bionetworks’s mission is to encourage sharing of data and insights as a mechanism of accelerating research while engaging citizens and patients more directly as partners in the area of biomedical research. Under Dr. Friend’s 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. Synapse enables researchers to seamlessly and transparently conduct, track and share their ongoing work – building up living research projects in real-time.

Selected bibliography

Stephen Friend has published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers. A few of these publications include:

References

  1. 1 2 Kaiser, Jocelyn (2012). "Profile Stephen Friend: The Visionary". Science 335 (6069): 651–653. doi:10.1126/science.335.6069.651. PMID 22323794.
  2. ↑ "Sage Bionetworks Seattle | Directors". Archived from the original on 2012-02-11.
  3. ↑ Anon (2008). "Stephen Friend". Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 7 (2): 114. doi:10.1038/nrd2509.
  4. ↑ http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/40/40ed6.full
  5. ↑ http://www.the-dream-project.org/
  6. ↑ Friend, S. H.; Schadt, E. E. (2014). "Clues from the resilient". Science 344 (6187): 970–2. doi:10.1126/science.1255648. PMID 24876479.
  7. ↑ Nelson, B.; Schadt, E. (2009). "Something wiki this way comes: Stephen Friend and Eric Schadt reveal their vision for an open-access platform in medical research.". Nature 458 (7234): 13. doi:10.1038/458013a. PMID 19262635.
  8. ↑ http://www.markeycancerfoundation.org/
  9. ↑ http://sagebase.org/info/NewsInfoDownloads/SageAshokaRelease6APR2011.pdf
  10. ↑ http://www.whitehouse.gov/champions
  11. ↑ Friend, S. H.; Bernards, R.; Rogelj, S.; Weinberg, R. A.; Rapaport, J. M.; Albert, D. M.; Dryja, T. P. (1986). "A human DNA segment with properties of the gene that predisposes to retinoblastoma and osteosarcoma". Nature 323 (6089): 643–6. doi:10.1038/323643a0. PMID 2877398.
  12. ↑ Diller L, Kassel J, Nelson CE, Gryka MA, Litwak G, Gebhardt M, Bressac B, Ozturk M, Baker SJ, Vogelstein B; Kassel; Nelson; Gryka; Litwak; Gebhardt; Bressac; Ozturk; Baker; Vogelstein (Nov 1990). "p53 functions as a cell cycle control protein in osteosarcomas". Mol Cell Biol 10 (11): 5772–81. doi:10.1128/MCB.10.11.5772 (inactive 2015-03-29). PMC 361354. PMID 2233717.
  13. ↑ http://www.sciencemag.org/content/250/4985/1233.long
  14. ↑ Van 't Veer, L. J.; Dai, H.; Van De Vijver, M. J.; He, Y. D.; Hart, A. A.; Bernards, R.; Friend, S. H. (2003). "Expression profiling predicts outcome in breast cancer". Breast Cancer Research 5 (1): 57–8. doi:10.1186/bcr562. PMC 154139. PMID 12559048.
  15. ↑ Van De Vijver, et.al. ; Friend, S. H.; Bernards, R. (2002). "A Gene-Expression Signature as a Predictor of Survival in Breast Cancer". New England Journal of Medicine 347 (25): 1999–2009. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa021967
  16. ↑ Schadt, E. E.; et.al.; Friend, S. H. (2003). "Genetics of gene expression surveyed in maize, mouse and man". Nature 422 (6929): 297. doi:10.1038/nature01434.
  17. ↑ Norman, T. C.; Bountra, C.; Edwards, A. M.; Yamamoto, K. R.; Friend, S. H. (2011). "Leveraging Crowdsourcing to Facilitate the Discovery of New Medicines". Science Translational Medicine 3 (88): 88mr1. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3002678
  18. ↑ Margolin, A. A.; et.al.; Friend, S. H.; Stolovitzky, G.; Aparicio, S.; Caldas, C.; Borresen-Dale, A. -L. (2013). "Systematic Analysis of Challenge-Driven Improvements in Molecular Prognostic Models for Breast Cancer". Science Translational Medicine 5 (181): 181re1. doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3006112
  19. ↑ Omberg, L.; Ellrott, K.; Yuan, Y.; Kandoth, C.; Wong, C.; Kellen, M. R.; Friend, S. H.; Stuart, J.; Liang, H.; Margolin, A. A. (2013). "Enabling transparent and collaborative computational analysis of 12 tumor types within the Cancer Genome Atlas". Nature Genetics 45 (10): 1121–6. doi:10.1038/ng.2761. PMC 3950337. PMID 24071850.

External links

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