Children's Hospital Boston has launched a competition to spur the use of genomic information in clinical care, reports The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog. Researchers participating in the $25,000-prize competition, called the CLARITY Challenge, will receive de-identified genomic data and medical histories for three patients with pediatric diseases and from their families, and will have to identify the best way to analyze the data, find relevant mutations, and report that information back to clinicians. A panel of judges, including Stanford's Russ Altman and Duke's Hunt Willard, will name the winner, the challenge's website adds. "[Genomic analysis] has come into practical fruition in the last couple of years, but a lot of work needs to be done to make it usable in a clinically responsible fashion," Children's Hospital Boston's Isaac Kohane tells the Health Blog. Findings from the competition will also be reported back to the families, it adds. The application deadline for researchers to participate in this challenge is March 1.
Our sister publication Clinical Sequencing News has more on CLARITY.