Cognoma Launch Party 🎉

Congratulations!!

WE DID IT!.. YOU DID IT! 👫👫👫👫👫👫👫👫👫👫

In June 2016, the Philly Tech community, in collaboration with Casey Greene’s Lab (http://www.greenelab.com/) at Penn, DataPhilly (https://www.meetup.com/DataPhilly/), and Code for Philly (https://codeforphilly.org/) set on a mission to create a webapp for analyzing cancer data.

Over the past year, we've hosted over 25 meetups, where hundreds of Philadelphia-area individuals ranging from front end developers, back end developers, Data Engineers, Scientists and community influencers volunteered to make http://cognoma.org (http://cognoma.org/) a reality.

Contributions were primarily made through GitHub (https://github.com/cognoma/cognoma), where over 35 individuals have had their work reviewed and accepted! 💻

The two Cognoma mottos are:

1. Bringing machine learning to the hands of cancer biologists.

2. Everyone learns something new.

We've had great progress on both fronts and now the Cognoma web app is finally LIVE!

Our goal is for cancer researchers to be able to use this webapp to take a data-driven approach towards understanding cancer.

Specifically, the ability to predict mutations from gene expression will help categorize the effect of mutations as well as potentially help match cancer therapies with the patients that will benefit most.

In addition, we're excited about getting the community involved!

Fun Fact: During one of our first Cognoma event’s, Jay Scott (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayscottphilly/), of Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (https://www.alexslemonade.org) had the opportunity to witness firsthand what Cognoma’s mission was all about.

Following that initial meeting, Casey started working with Alex's Lemonade Stand and, in August 2017, launched a new initiative of ALSF that is working to use big data in the fight against childhood cancer.

Because of the Philly Tech Community's hard work, and dedication in volunteering their time and skills over the last year (not because they had to, but because they wanted to) towards bringing this initiative to fruition, anyone is now able to use this app in production. 🎉

Thus, we are inviting you to come to our launch party where you will have the opportunity to see the app in action, and mingle with all the folks who created it. (And there are a lot!) So we encourage you, and the people you love to come for a really fun night filled with raffles and prizes and delicious discounted drinks.

All of the proceeds from the raffle will go towards The Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation's Childhood Cancer Data Lab (http://www.ccdatalab.org/), which will be maintaining Cognoma going forward.

Thank you to everyone who participated and contributed to Cognoma, Penn Institute for Biomedical Informatics (http://upibi.org/) for sponsoring the yummy pizza, CandiDate (http://www.candidatephilly.com/) for hosting us, and Milkboy (http://www.milkboyphilly.com/) for giving us the space to do the Launch Party.

NOW, LET'S PARTY!! 🎉 🎉

From all of us at Cognoma,

Thank you, thank you!!!