Managing Knowledge about Tissues (Brussels, Belgium)

On October 30–31, 2013, Open PHACTS helped to co-organise the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) workshop on Managing Knowledge about Tissues, along with partners on the IMI projects DDMoRe and eTox. The workshop focussed on the following five R&D resource types to enable the cross-linking, querying and visualisation of tissue knowledge embedded across IMI efforts:

1. development: clinical measurement data (e.g. radiological biomarkers, fluid biochemistry, physiology measurements flow, electrophysiology);
2. modelling: mechanism-based models of disease– or drug-related processes in pharmacokinetics (e.g. absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion) and pharmacodynamics;
3. discovery: measurement of gene expression and gene product localisation, as well as tissue-specific information about drug receptors and transporters;
4. safety/tox: tissue-specific toxicology assessments, histopathology reports, and anatomy-specific pharmacovigilance signals;
5. terms: terminological resources for disease and clinical trials (e.g. CDISC).

The primary activities at the workshop were:

Day 1
Survey and report on the ‘state of the art’ in tissue knowledge representation (KR) and management (KM) across ongoing IMI projects. In particular, various groups will hold demonstrations of their methods and tools that enable the functional integration across any of the above resource types through standardized annotation, automated inferencing or multiscale visualisation.

Day 2
Identify stakeholders to roadmap the sustainable development of (i) communal KR interoperability standards, (ii) tools that leverage these standards, resulting in (iii) shared tissue KM practices for the IMI community. Three key topics for discussion and co-ordination are community development, publications and funding strategies.

Presentations

Two presentations were given by Open PHACTS representatives:

Knowledge management for transmembrane transporters (Daniela Digles, University of Vienna)

Open PHACTS: How does it work? How can it work for tissue knowledge management? (Christine Chichester, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)