Building an information framework to drive drug discovery
Open PHACTS consortium aims to create an Open Pharmacological Space
A consortium of European organisations has come together to support next-generation drug discovery by providing a single view across data sources, bringing the semantic web to drug discovery.
The Open PHACTS consortium, with €16.4m of funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative, will create an Open Pharmacological Space, which will be freely accessible for knowledge discovery and verification.
Open PHACTS will provide a growing body of data on small molecules, their pharmacological profiles, pharmacokinetics, ADMET data, biological targets and pathways in a semantically interoperable format. Aligning and integrating proprietary and public data sources into a single system is currently a very difficult and time consuming task, repeated across companies, institutes and academic laboratories.
Open PHACTS is a major three-year project including many of the top semantic web experts.
The success of the Open PHACTS project is expected to drive researchers around the globe to capture and distribute data and information in a semantically interoperable and computer readable format. Recognising that the power of standards lies in their widespread adoption, the core information framework is built on the principles of Open Source, Open Access and Open Data.
Bryn Williams-Jones, project coordinator, said: ‘Being able to access available resources from a single system will be a huge immediate benefit to pharmaceutical companies. Building a framework that future data can flow into will reduce information management barriers even further.’
The initial development effort is focused on a six-month prototype using exemplar resources and technologies to provide a proof of concept. Identification and prioritisation of research questions will also be one of the first project milestones, driven by the pharmaceutical companies involved (including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Merck, Lundbeck, Eli Lilly and Esteve) to deliver real answers relevant to drug discovery.
The experience gained will define further development approaches to bring together data and classifications from a variety of existing public resources and other sources from the consortium members.