The tranSMART Foundation, U-BIOPRED and eTRIKS Win Bio-IT World Best Practices Award for U-BIOPRED Knowledge Portal
Wakefield, Mass. (PRWEB) May 28, 2014 -- Led by Academic Medical Centre, Amsterdam, U-BIOPRED (unbiased biomarkers for the prediction of respiratory disease outcomes) is a severe asthma research project with multiple stakeholders and funded (€21m) by EU-IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiative). It was comprised of longitudinal clinical (adult and pediatric) studies and associated animal, in vitro and in silico model translational studies, using multi-omics technologies that attempted to produce novel classifiers better describing asthma disease heterogeneity. Presented with numerous IT challenges related to the complexities of big data in biomedical and translational research, the U-BIOPRED Knowledge Portal leveraged the tranSMART v1.1 platform to enable data integration, analysis and project-wide access to 10 different datasets (clinical and omics).
“By developing the collaboration portal on the tranSMART platform, the consortium of 43 partners from industry and academia was able to eliminate redundancy and inconsistency during the process,” said tranSMART Foundation CEO Keith Elliston. “The U-BIOPRED project has assembled one of the largest and most detailed collection of patients with severe asthma. The effort to organize the knowledge management platform in U-BIOPRED inspired IMI to fund eTRIKS, a €23.7m knowledge management project that is focused on developing a platform and services to manage its €2b investment.”
“The effort to establish the U-BIOPRED tranSMART platform required some dynamic thinking and collaboration on multiple levels,” explained Ioannis Pandis, postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College and one of the key drivers in making the platform happen. “Complex translational research datasets are becoming the norm and it is efforts like these that are effectively sharing and analyzing the datasets that will harness the power of the ongoing data explosion.”
In addition to the data integration and analysis support provided by the tranSMART platform, the extended platform enabled the management of scientific hypothesis generation, analytic workflow and publication process, while also ensuring full transparency to a multi-stakeholder project. This is the first real collaborative knowledge management platform in EU translational research. Its success inspired the major investment to the knowledge management technology and service support in the EU IMI program through the funding of eTRIKS and EMIF projects totaling €100m for five years.
For more information on the U-BIOPRED project, watch this video or visit: http://www.ubiopred.eu.
About eTRIKS
eTRIKS is a knowledge management and service infrastructure project aimed at development of a software and hardware system capable of the efficient storage and effective analysis of experimental data from studies in man, in animals and in pre-clinical models, maximizing the scientific knowledge that can be extracted from such studies. The project’s primary goal is to deliver a knowledge management system for ongoing and future IMI studies, such as U-BIOPRED, that require correlative analysis of both pre-clinical and clinical genome-scale biomarker data (genetics and genomics platforms) in conjunction with medical data from clinical trials. This open-source system will also be available for use outside of projects sponsored by IMI. For more information about the eTRIKS project go to - http://www.etriks.org.
About The tranSMART Foundation
The tranSMART Foundation is a non-profit organization that provides an open-source, cloud-based, data-sharing and analysis platform that enables scientists at universities, disease foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies around the world to share pre-competitive data in a way that saves money and time in translating research findings into new therapies and diagnostic tools. Founded to steward the tranSMART platform, the Foundation is headquartered in Wakefield, Massachusetts with Centers of Excellence in Ann Arbor, Mich.; London, England; Boston, Mass.; and Amsterdam, Netherlands. The tranSMART Foundation can also be found on the web at http://www.tranSMARTFoundation.org.
Karen Higgins, 610-831-5723, [email protected]
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