EU grants
eTransafe
eTRANSAFE is a €40 million project that is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which began in September 2017. This five-year project aims to develop an advanced data integration infrastructure and new computational methods to improve drug safety. ELIXIR is part of the project consortium of 8 academic institutions, 6 SMEs and 12 pharmaceutical companies. It leads two tasks: (1) creating a policy framework that allows industry and other organisations to share drug safety data and to adhere to consistent guidelines for predictive toxicology models; and (2) data interoperability and integration. The technical and scientific work is carried out by three ELIXIR Nodes: EMBL-EBI, ELIXIR Denmark (Technical University of Denmark) and ELIXIR Spain (through the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and IMIM). In 2018, ELIXIR successfully delivered the Initial Data and Knowledge Management Plan. This plan set out a general overview of the best practices and recommendations for how data and knowledge were to be shared among key project stakeholders and publicly disseminated outside of the consortium. This initial plan will be used as the foundation for a complete set of recommendations concerning best practices on the sharing of knowledge, data, and of toxicology model validation guidelines, which will be produced at a later stage of the project. In the domain of data integration, ELIXIR leads the coordination of the incoming data normalisation and formalisation via standards and ontologies. This work motivated the goal to identify the activities involved in a user’s journey throughout a sequential analysis process, which led to the establishment of the Workflows Taskforce. The Workflows Taskforce, as derived from the data integration drive, was then initiated under ELIXIR’s lead coordination. The eTRANSAFE Workflows Taskforce, for example, aims to specify a test case of task-based, step-by-step activities (such as ontology mapping and text mining) that toxicology scientists perform when querying the eTRANSAFE knowledgebase for drug safety concerns. Since the Workflows Taskforce was established in 2018, another test case has looked at driving biological questions in the cheminformatics domain. This test case aims in 2019 to cover such queries from an adverse events perspective.
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ELIXIR Annual Report 2018
CORBEL
CORBEL is a collaboration of 13 ESFRI biomedical research infrastructures funded through EU’s Horizon 2020 programme. The project’s goal is to establish a framework of shared services between the participating infrastructures. The CORBEL consortium is led by ELIXIR as the coordinator, with the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI) as cocoordinator. In March 2018, CORBEL launched its second Open Call for research projects that offered all academic and industrial scientists in Europe access to technologies and services from ten European research infrastructures (CORBEL project partners). The call consisted of four submission rounds (in April, June, August and October) and attracted 23 project applications from academia and industry, covering all access tracks. 13 applications were accepted as CORBEL user projects following a thorough scientific and technical review. All projects will receive continuous support by the CORBEL Open Call project managers during the access phase, as needed. The CORBEL project will conclude in 2020. However, the existing consortium will continue its work within the EOSC-Life project. The project proposal was prepared and submitted in 2018, led by ELIXIR as the project coordinator. The project starts in March 2019 with the overall budget of over €23 million and will run until 2023. EOSC-Life represents the life-science component of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The overall goal of the project is to ensure that life scientists can find, access, and integrate life-science data for analysis and reuse in academic and industrial research. EOSC-Life will provide an open, continent-scale, collaborative, and interdisciplinary environment for data science within all domains of life science and will provide researchers with direct access to FAIR data and tools in a cloud environment that is available throughout the European Research Area.