Big Pharma and academic groups have made more progress in joining forces on advancing software for translational research on a pre-competitive basis. The tranSMART Foundation has released tranSMART version 1.1, based on software originally developed at Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ), as a cloud-based application for sharing translational research data. "Our goal is to create a collaborative translational research community," said Michael Braxenthaler, an informatics expert from Roche ($RHHBY), who serves as co-CEO of the tranSMART Foundation. "Our development community is focused on the Foundation's three Cs: code, community and content. With the open tranSMART platform, we are limiting dependency on commercial software products and leveraging the expertise of the entire user community. We have an aggressive product roadmap to develop the next generation of the platform to include new interfaces and analytical functionality as well as a more modern information architecture." (Eric Perakslis, the former CIO of the FDA and a lead developer of tranSMART, is a featured panelist at an upcoming FierceBiotech event next month in Boston.) Release