As it was at the outset of the SOUND project, also after its end, Bioconductor remains one of the most widely used software systems for analysis of (gen)omic data with over 26,000 full text mentions in Pubmed Central. A major theme for the SOUND project was to exploit the enormous potential in increasing the reach of Bioconductor to translational and clinical research, and even into clinical care. SOUND made impressive progress along this way, with beneficial implications for patients across Europe. Almost every European citizen will at one point in their life encounter a medical situation in which personalized medicine, i.e. rational, biology-based diagnosis and treatment choice, could have an existential effect on them - if available. The speed at which we implement this transition and make sure such diagnoses and choices available, will affect thousands of lives. There is an associated market for new products and services, e.g. clinical laboratory characterization of samples upon diagnosis, or continuous monitoring of patients under risk for preventative medicine, that is worth billions of Euros. There is also a large potential for savings of costs and suffering in the health system, as treatments that are useless for a particular individual can be avoided and resources can be allocated more precisely. Given the scale of SOUND, and that of the above-mentioned challenges, it is clear that SOUND could only make a small, but hopefully effective contribution. Thus, we aimed at providing well-chosen, critical building blocks that, we hope, will now be further built upon by clinician-scientist led research groups, computational scientists with high-powered expertise in areas such as the mining of big data, mathematical modelling and rigorous statistical analysis, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that can realize business opportunities, but do not have the research resources to develop mathematically and computationally complex tools themselves.
