An Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury and Beyond

This year the BASIC team fully launched the first multi-stakeholder, large-scale data-sharing initiative in spinal cord injury research: the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury (ODC-SCI.org), funded by the Craig H. Neilsen Foundation with endorsements from the NIH, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and nonprofits. This effort is being co-led by UCSF principal investigator Adam Ferguson, PhD, and a steering committee composed of international spinal cord injury thought leaders, including UCSF BASIC’s Michael Beattie, PhD, and Jacqueline Bresnahan, PhD.

The BASIC team also recently received funding to extend this model to traumatic brain injury (TBI), with Ferguson, Beattie, Bresnahan, and Susanna Rosi, PhD, as co-principal investigators. One of five awards granted nationally by the Translational Outcomes Project in Neurotrauma (TOP-NT) (UG3/UH3) funding program from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), the effort will focus on early biomarker discovery in preclinical TBI. The same team also received an award from the VA to focus on chronic TBI data science.