Portal:OpenPHACTS/About

From WikiPathways

Current revision

Drug discovery is data-hungry and all major pharmaceutical companies maintain extensive in-house instances of public data. Analysis and hypothesis generation for drug-discovery projects requires assembly, overlay and comparison of data from many sources and requiring shared identifiers and common semantics. Expression profiles need to be overlaid with gene or pathway identifiers and reports on compound pharmacology. Alignment and integration of internal and public data and information sources requires a significant effort and the process is repeated across companies, institutes and academic laboratories. This represents significant waste and increases opportunity cost. To address these challenges, the Open PHACTS project will 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.

The Open PHACTS consortium comprises 14 European academic and SME partners, with leading experts in the fields of data mining, annotation, small molecule data storage and manipulation, target bioinformatics, RDF information handling, massive in silico reasoning and chemical biology.

Open PHACTS is funded by Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private partnership between the European Union and the EFPIA.