25/01/2019

First year of the european project eTRANSAFE: read the keynote from Prof. Ferran Sanz, Project Coordinator

The eTRANSAFE (Enhancing TRANslational SAFEty Assessment through Integrative Knowledge Management) project aims at enhancing the efficiency of translational safety assessment during the drug discovery and development process by means of the development of an integrative data infrastructure and innovative computational methods and tools. This infrastructure will be underpinned by legacy data sharing, the use of data standards, such as the SEND format for preclinical studies, and the implementation of a modular computational architecture.

eTRANSAFE started its journey in September 2017 and during the first year, we have set the foundations for the development of widely accepted guidelines on safe legacy data sharing, and we have been working in the extension of the preclinical database released in the previous IMI eTOX project, in terms of incorporation of individual animal data in SEND format together with structural and pharmacological information. In addition, identification of useful data available in the public domain, its integration with the data contributed from the EFPIA partners and the identification of potential challenges by means of prototypes and use cases have been the first steps to move forward the development of the eTRANSAFE Knowledge Hub.

In the past months, an internal group, which gathers representatives from all workpackages, has been intensively working on the development of a preliminary prototype solution that allows searching for compounds, annotation of those compounds with pre-clinical and clinical data and visualisation of that data. This has proven to be a useful exercise to provide the project a means to better explore how data will need to be integrated and accessed from the Final Knowledge Hub. This work will be further developed.

The Project is pleased of the progress achieved and will continue advancing towards the final objective of supporting and improving the drug discovery and development.

Click here to read more about the eTRANSAFE project.

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