New data hub will accelerate development and adoption of human-based New Approach Methodologies
SEATTLE, WA, UNITED STATES, March 18, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Researchers developing new drugs or studying human diseases often rely on animal models that don’t accurately reflect human biology. A growing body of research points to human-based alternatives, such as organ-on-chip devices and organoids grown from patient cells, collectively called New Approach Methodologies (NAMs), as more reliable tools for modeling human health and disease. But these emerging methods generate complex, diverse data that currently lacks shared standards or infrastructure, making it difficult for researchers to compare results or build on each other’s work.
Sage Bionetworks today announced its role as a key partner in the newly funded NAMs Data Hub and Coordinating Center (NDHCC), part of the National Institutes of Health Common Fund’s Complement Animal Research In Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) program. The NDHCC, led by NYU Langone Health in collaboration with Sage Bionetworks, will build the data and standards infrastructure needed to accelerate the development, standardization, and adoption of NAMs, helping researchers and independent validation groups find, reuse, and compare data across labs and experiments and verify recapitulation of human disease. The Complement-ARIE program represents a major investment by the NIH Common Fund in advancing human-based research methods, at a time when regulators including the FDA and European Commission are actively encouraging the field to move beyond animal testing.
As part of the NDHCC, Sage will host the consortium’s data backbone, providing a FAIR-compliant hub for data, code, and computational models, along with AI-augmented data curation and quality control, a standardized framework for harmonizing NAMs data across the consortium, and analytical tools to help researchers work with complex datasets. The cloud-native semi-federated hub will incorporate Sage’s AI-powered Curator tool for metadata curation and leverage the organization’s Synapse platform, which supports over 100,000 researchers and stewards more than 3.5 petabytes of annotated biomedical data across more than 100 modalities. The data hub will leverage and build upon Sage Bionetworks’ experience from 26 data coordinating centers, including the Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN), the Accelerating Medicines Partnership for Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP-AD), the BRAIN Initiative, Bridge2AI, and the AD Knowledge Portal. The NDHCC will also foster community adoption of NAMs by supporting DREAM Challenges – open data science competitions hosted on Synapse – along with workshops, training materials, and consortium-wide meetings to broadly disseminate findings and tools.
“The NYU Langone-Sage NDHCC will expand upon the work Sage Bionetworks has been doing for more than a decade, building infrastructure that makes collaborative biomedical research possible at scale,” said Jineta Banerjee, Ph.D., Associate Director of Advanced Data Analytics at Sage Bionetworks and one of the Principal Investigators of the NDHCC. “We’re bringing our experience in FAIR data principles, metadata harmonization, ML model evaluation, and AI-enabled data curation to the Complement-ARIE program to enable a ‘live’ data pipeline from raw data to computational models. Our work in the new approach methodologies (NAMs) will support this emerging research community working towards transforming how we model and study human health and disease.”
“I am extremely pleased that the NYU Langone–Sage Bionetworks partnership will play a key role in coordinating the data and activities of the Complement-ARIE program,” said Gustavo Stolovitzky, PhD, Director of the Biomedical Data Science Hub at NYU Langone and a member of the Board of Directors at Sage Bionetworks. “The NYU–Sage Data Hub and Coordinating Center will make the data generated by the Complement-ARIE consortium analysis- and AI-ready, enabling researchers to translate the curated data into new discoveries. It is a privilege to contribute to the consortium’s mission of reducing reliance on animal models through data-driven innovation.”
ABOUT THE COMPLEMENT-ARIE PROGRAM
The NIH Common Fund’s Complement Animal Research In Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) program speeds the development, standardization, validation, and use of human-based New Approach Methodologies. The program brings together technology development projects, a data and resource coordination center, a validation network, community engagement and training, and strategic partnerships with regulatory agencies and industry. For more information, visit commonfund.nih.gov/complementarie.
ABOUT SAGE BIONETWORKS
Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization based in Seattle, Washington, dedicated to promoting open science, responsible data sharing, and collaborative research. Through its Synapse platform, Sage enables large-scale collaborative research projects that advance understanding of complex diseases and accelerate translation of discoveries into clinical applications. For more information, visit sagebionetworks.org.
Mackenzie Wildman
Sage Bionetworks
communications@sagebionetworks.org
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