Oracle has utilized its technology platform in the ongoing fight against COVID-19 to develop and deploy a series of cloud applications that will gather the data necessary to determine what drugs are effective in treating or preventing the virus, the company announced on Thursday.

The company has used a clinical trials system, which has examined many drugs including the cancer drug Keytruda, that have been approved by regulators worldwide after Oracle Clinical Trial Systems.

The system has collected data to prove drugs were both safe and effective. The Oracle Cloud has begun testing the safety and effectiveness of dozens of different COVID-19 drugs and vaccines. The trials will be completed in many countries and hundreds of institutional sites.

Oracle’s newest cloud system, Clinical One, will enable institutions to start-up a clinical trial in as few as two weeks. The company has also integrated a therapeutic learning system in addition to gathering data from COVID-19 clinical trials.

The company has built and donated to the US government a COVID-19 Therapeutic Learning System that has allowed physicians and patients to record the effectiveness of COVID-19 drug therapies, such as Hydroxychloroquine, Remdesivir and Kaletra.

The drugs have been safely used to treat other diseases but are not yet definitively proven to be effective against COVID-19. Physicians are now routinely prescribing these drugs to treat COVID-19 patients.

Oracle’s Therapeutic Learning System will enable the physician to record the patient’s daily progress. The solution will quickly discover which of the new drugs are most effective against COVID-19, optimal dosages and how early in the disease progression the drugs need to be administered.

The Therapeutic Learning System was the result of a partnership with the National Institute of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Department of Health and Human Services.

About Oracle  

The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for Sales, Service, Marketing, Human Resources, Finance, Supply Chain and Manufacturing, plus Highly Automated and Secure Generation 2 Infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database.

The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a notice of proposed rulemaking to establish noise certification requirements for takeoff and landing of civil supersonic aircraft platforms.

A 90-day public comment period will commence on the date of publication of the proposal in the Federal Register, FAA said Monday.

The agency unveiled the NPRM nine months after it proposed to modernize the process of requesting special flight authorizations to fly aircraft at a speed above Mach 1.

FAA also works with the Department of Transportation in efforts to advance supersonic aircraft development and expects the new rulemaking activity to help the agency determine technological and economic factors that will support noise level requirements for such vehicle.

The agency pointed to the availability of new engines and materials designed to address noise from the airframe as technical advancements that have occurred in the aviation field since the Concorde supersonic passenger airplane took flight in the 1970s.

Lockheed Martin is manufacturing the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology platform at a company facility located in Palmdale, Calif., as part of a $247.5M contract NASA awarded in 2018.

The company aims to conduct initial test flights in 2021.

The Department of Education is inviting businesses, nonprofits, academic institutions and entrepreneurs to join a $50K prize competition to update its public-facing website.

ED.gov Redesign Challenge participants have until June 15 to offer creative design prototypes for the site’s home, program office, grant, contact, media and informational pages, according to a special notice posted Tuesday.

The department wants to retain its color scheme and seal as well as ensure compliance with federal accessibility standards into a redesigned online portal.

ED noted it may divide the prize among multiple winners that would propose ideas to improve the design, presentation, interactivity and navigation of its website.

Proposers may also receive an invitation to deliver presentations to an expert panel at the department’s Washington, D.C. office and will have the chance to bid for a concept implementation contract.

The General Services Administration has announced a delay in the acquisition process for the e-marketplace platform as GSA works to meet the demand of federal agencies for information technology hardware and related services in support of telework initiatives during the coronavirus pandemic.

“The contracting team for the Commercial Platforms proof of concept has also had to shift their focus to COVID-19 response efforts,” Laura Stanton, deputy assistant commissioner for category management at GSA, said in a statement published Wednesday. “A delay is anticipated in the contract award to e-marketplace platform providers for the proof of concept.”

Stanton said her organization’s goal is to award the contract “in the coming months.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will begin deploying new capabilities for Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation dashboards in April to help federal agencies gain more insight into their cybersecurity posture, Fifth Domain reported Wednesday.

Judy Baltensperger, project manager for the CDM dashboard at CISA, said the agency will start fielding risk-scoring and ongoing assessment metrics and other “minimum viable products” for the dashboards this month.

“We’re going to focus on delivering simple features,” Baltensberger said. “Then through our scaled, agile software development, we’re going to iteratively make enhancements to each of these products, and we’re also going to be collecting user feedback from each one of [the] agencies.”

She said DHS will release another update in August and another set of minimum viable products like threat intelligence feed integration and system health monitoring in November.

“The goal is going to be fit for use, operational data. We want you to trust the data that is in this dashboard, and we want to see you start to take action and make risk-based decisions on it,” Baltensberger said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health have launched a joint research and development initiative focused on using additive manufacturing to address medical equipment shortages, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

The three agencies signed a memorandum of understanding and is seeking 3D-printing capabilities that will enable the rapid production of medical supplies and personal protective equipment amid the coronavirus pandemic.

America Makes, a nonprofit startup accelerator organization, teamed up with the agencies to help them coordinate with firms in the manufacturing sector as part of the initiative.

NIH currently has an open-source tool called 3D Print Exchange where entities can identify and share models that are interoperable with commercial 3D printers. The VA, which assesses and tests the user-submitted designs, also has its own 3D printing network to aid the operations of its medical frontliners.

“This initiative is rapidly evolving,” Beth Ripley, enterprise lead of the VA 3D Printing Network. “In just six days, VA tested two face shields and designed and tested one face mask. We have already made significant progress in a short time.”