30/9/2014

Project Open PHACTS on track for sustainability

The Open PHACTS project has taken further steps along the path to sustainability for its outputs by launching a new version of its drug discovery platform and ensuring the long-term financial and technical viability of the infrastructure. Open PHACTS has developed a powerful cloud-based data platform that allows scientists to draw on diverse databases to answer all kinds of questions relating to drug development. The new version of the platform provides access to two additional data sets and also provides extra information on compounds. Elsewhere, the Open PHACTS Foundation has ensured the sustainability of the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform by funding secure hosting and organising the ongoing technical development of the infrastructure.

Several GRIB groups have contributed significantly to this european project, in particular the PharmacoInformatics group led by M. Pastor, the System Pharmacology group led by J. Mestres and the Integrative Biomedical Informatics group led by LI. Furlong and F. Sanz. As said M. Pastor: "the success of the Open PHACTS foundation demonstrates the value of the IMI projects outcomes and opens the path to similar initiatives. As promised, the Open PHACTS project is releasing a sustainable platform that can produce significant impact, increasing the productivity of biomedical research groups, both in industry and academia, for years to come".

Looking to the future, the project is now ready to tackle new scientific challenges and use cases by integrating commercial data sources and proprietary in-house data into its platform, adding more platform functionalities, and enhancing connections with workflow tools and engaging existing and upcoming IMI projects and initiatives.

 The Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple Store project (Open PHACTS) develop an open access innovation platform, called Open Pharmacological Space (OPS), via a semantic web approach. OPS will be comprised of data, vocabularies and infrastructure needed to accelerate drug- oriented research. The aim is to develop an enabling resource for drug discovery projects which is open to all users and freely available in the public domain. This european project is funded by the Innovative Medicines Iniciative (IMI) and has been recently extended until 2016.