For decades, the healthcare industry has lacked a long list of elements necessary to understand the nature of hundreds of rare diseases — industry cohesiveness and data transparency chief amongst them. With the help of PwC and Microsoft, one pioneering group of minds may have finally found a key part of the solution: an open-source approach to medical research.

“We have a lot of smart, motivated, dedicated people together who want to see these patients have a different path. The technology is there for personalized medicine. The technology is there to make advances in rare disease,” says Elizabeth Estes, Open Source Imaging Consortium (OSIC) Executive Director.