The BioIT Alliance is designed to enable collaboration among organizations in the Life Sciences field in order to shorten the time between discovery of new biological data and the application of that knowledge to human health. You can find a video BLOG that explains the Alliance here. We will disseminate information to Alliance Members through the Alliance web site and Alliance members will share white papers, case studies, and other information there with other Alliance members and customers. The site will have live customer content later on this year when we have a significant news item that will draw people to that content.

In order to advance the state of the art in BioIT we are coordinating Proof of Concept applications that illustrate the use of Microsoft technology solving problems that are critical to the Life Sciences industry. In general these applications will involve a small number of organizations working closely together to make progress quickly while drawing advice and feedback from the wider group of Alliance members. The first of these applications will be used at The Scripps Research Institute to capture more laboratory data electronically and enable scientists to annotate it and search for it effectively. We will be sending out information shortly about our next Proof of Concept in order to get feedback from Alliance members and to ensure that we have the right collaborators for the project.

To join the Alliance, we ask that you sign a standard reciprocal Non-Disclosure agreement with Microsoft that enables us to share information freely. In order to post information to the web site we have a Co-Marketing agreement that has simple terms for the use of the site. In order to receive the paperwork to sign up for the Alliance we ask that you send the following information to bita@microsoft.com:

• Name, Title, Phone Number, and email address of our primary contact for the alliance (vcard format is ideal if you have it)
• Name and Title of the signatory to the Alliance agreements
• Company name as it should appear on the agreements
• Company Address