Open PHACTS Foundation

The Open PHACTS Consortium

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The Open PHACTS Consortium

On June 15, 2015, Posted by , With No Comments

Open PHACTS began as an Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project, aiming to reduce the barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia, and for small businesses. This project was realised by members of the Open PHACTS Consortium, listed below.


GlaxoSmithKline Research a. Development LTD
GSK is one of the world’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. Headquartered in the UK, GSK is a global organisation with offices in over 100 countries and major research centres in the UK, USA, Belgium and China.

Universität Wien

The University of Vienna encompasses a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, ranging from theology, jurisprudence, economics, computer science, to the humanities and to the social and natural sciences. 73.000 students from 130 countries are currently enrolled at the University which offers more than 135 Bachelor, Master, Diploma and Doctoral programmes. UNIVIE coordinates numerous EU-projects and also several joint degree programmes. The Pharmacoinformics group, headed by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Ecker, is specialized in the prediction of off-target effects with a focus on transporter and ion channels.


Technical University of Denmark
The Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS) at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is headed by Søren Brunak and is one of the largest academic bioinformatics clusters in Europe. CBS has expertise in systems biology and chemical/biological network analysis from commercial and public databases.

Universität Hamburg
With about 38,000 students and 650 full professors, the University of Hamburg is one of the Germany’s largest universities. The Computational Molecular Design Group, headed by Prof. Dr. Matthias Rarey, has its focus on the development of new computational approaches for the design of bioactive compounds, especially drugs. The combination of high computer science and molecular modeling expertise is quite unique and a major strength of the group.

BioSolveIT GmbH
BioSolveIT is a leading provider of software solutions for drug discovery applications. The software portfolio ranges from design, over screening, to the visualization of ligand libraries, for hit identification, optimization, and scaffold hopping.

Consorci Mar Parc de Salut de Barcelona
Consorci Mar Parc de Salut (PSMAR) is a publicly owned organisation devoted to provide health services in the geographic area of the city of Barcelona. PSMAR participates in Open PHACTS through the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), which is a joint research programme of IMIM (research institute of PSMAR) and UPF (Pompeu Fabra University).

Academisch Ziekenhuis Leiden – LUMC
The LUMC is a leading medical centre in The Netherlands with over 7000 staff members and hosts the Center for Medical Systems Biology. LUMC in this proposal acts as the penholder for the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC). LUMC/NBIC will bring into the project important tools for web based community annotation of the major biomedical and chemical vocabularies and how to use these in combination with intelligent algorithms to construct knowledge bases.

Royal Society of Chemistry
The RSC is the largest organisation in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences. Supported by a worldwide network of members and an international publishing business, their activities span education, conferences, science policy and the promotion of chemistry to the public. ChemSpider is a free chemical structure database providing fast access to over 26 million structures, properties and associated information. By integrating and linking compounds from more than 400 data sources, ChemSpider enables researchers to discover the most comprehensive view of freely available chemical data from a single online search.

VU University Amsterdam
The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam hosts one of the leading Semantic Web research groups worldwide. The group initiated and coordinated the EU’s first Semantic Web project On-To-Knowledge in 1999, and has participated since in key EU-funded projects such as Knowledge Web (scientific coordination), SEKT, SWAP and OpenKnowledge.

Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas
The Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO ), combines both basic and applied research, with programmes in basic research, drug discovery and clinical activities. The Structural Biology and BioComputing programme includes a strong bioinformatics component with specific interest in integrated analysis of cancer genome data, in the context of large scale international project and/or collaborations with in-house groups. The Programme SBBC host the central node of the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute, that is part of the European BIoinformatics Infrastructure initiative ELIXIR-ESFRI.

The University of Manchester
The University of Manchester encompasses a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines, with a world-leading School of Computer Science, ranked in the top categories of the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise. This school is recognized as a world leader in e-Science and scientific computing, in particular bioinformatics research and training, the theory and application of Semantic Web technologies and knowledge management, new forms digital publishing and social computing.

Maastricht Universiteit
With 13,100 students and 3,500 staff members UM offers a wide choice of academic programs. Researchers at UM work in multidisciplinary teams and in close cooperation with international institutes, business and industry. The high-quality researchers have taken the lead in several large European research projects.

Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
The USC has more than 2,000 professional and research staff and over 30,000 students. Barcelona Science Park (PCB), associate partner of the USC, is home to four research institutes, 75 companies and an incubator for biotechnology companies. USC and PCB are the experimental partners of the Spanish ChemBioBank (CBB), a chemical library of drug-like compounds.

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn
The Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT) is a center for research and education jointly established between the University of Bonn, the Technical University of Aachen and the Fraunhofer Society. At B-IT, the Open PHACTS activities are led by Dr. Marc Zimmermann, the cheminformatics expert in the research team of Prof. Martin Hofmann-Apitius.

AstraZeneca AB
As one of the top five biopharmaceutical companies in the world, AstraZeneca with one of the largest drug discovery research staffs in the world, distributed over 5 major research sites in Europe, North America and Asia, is a ‘complete’ pharmaceutical organisation, discovering, developing and marketing therapeutics.

Pfizer Limited
Pfizer Limited is the European subsidiary of Pfizer Inc., the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. As one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, they are at the cutting-edge of the research and development of medicines for humans and animals. Their outstanding research activities, together with their highly motivated staff, secure the sustainable success and growth of our company.

ESTEVE is a leading pharmaceutical chemical Group in Spain with a significant presence worldwide. It operates in the pharmaceutical sector by researching and developing new drugs, marketing a wide range of ethical and OTC products, generics, vaccines and also products for hospital and veterinary use. Through its subsidiary Esteve Química is also present in the Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients sector.

Novartis Pharma AG
Novartis Pharma AG is a multinational pharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland with approximately 100,000 associates in 140 countries worldwide. Novartis focuses on discovering, developing and successfully marketing innovative products to prevent and cure diseases, to ease suffering and to enhance the quality of life.

Merck Serono is the division for innovative prescription pharmaceuticals of Merck, a global pharmaceutical and chemical group. Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Merck Serono discovers, develops, manufactures and markets innovative small molecules and biopharmaceuticals to help patients with unmet medical needs.

H. Lundbeck A/S
Lundbeck is an international pharmaceutical company conducting research into, developing, manufacturing, marketing, selling and distributing pharmaceuticals for the treatment of neurological disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and insomnia. Lundbeck is one of Denmark’s most research-intensive enterprises.

Eli Lilly and Company Limited
Eli Lilly and Company Limited is the UK affiliate of the major American pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly and Company of Indianapolis. This affiliate is one of the UK´s top pharmaceutical companies, with a research and development centre, a manufacturing site and a distribution centre which exports medicines to all parts of the world.

Stichting Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre
Active since 2003, NBIC is a collaborative institute of about 30 bioinformatics groups in the Netherlands, many of them affiliated through the Netherlands Genomic Initiative. Together, these groups perform cutting-edge research, develop novel tools and support platforms, create an e-bioscience infrastructure and educate the next generations of bioinformaticians.

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation recognized of public utility. Its two-fold mission is to provide world-class core bioinformatics resources to the national and international life science research community in key fields such as genomics, proteomics and systems biology; as well as to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. It has a long-standing tradition of producing state-of-the-art software for the life science research community, as well as carefully annotated databases such as Swiss-Prot, neXtProt or PROSITE.

Connected Discovery
Connected Discovery develops pre-competitive solutions to the knowledge challenges facing drug discovery today by connecting companies, leading academics and biotech specialists. It provides the bandwidth, knowledge and experience to successfully deliver pre-competitive projects through leadership, technical consulting, workflow expertise and software production. We possess over 30 years collective experience of large pharma drug discovery, computational science and knowledge management experience.

European Bioinformatics Institute
The European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) is a non-profit academic organization that forms part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). It is a centre for research and services in bioinformatics. The Institute manages worldwide reference databases of biological data including nucleic acid and protein sequences, macromolecular structures, chemicals, gene expression, proteomics, models and pathways. The EMBL-EBI is the main European data centre for the biosciences. Leading numerous large scale collaborations in data sharing, it is now the coordinator of ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for data sharing in life sciences.

Janssen Pharmaceutica NV
Johnson and Johnson, the holding of which Janssen Pharmaceutica NV is an affiliate, is one of the world’s most comprehensive and broadly based manufacturer of health care products. The more than 230 Johnson and Johnson operating companies employ more than hundred thousand men and women in 57 countries and sell products throughout the world. Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson and Johnson, is one of the leading developers of pharmaceutical products in the world.

OpenLink Software
OpenLink Software, UK is an industry acclaimed technology innovator in database and application server software and has been a long time developer of database and semantic repository technologies on both single servers and clusters. This, combined with OpenLink’s experience with SQL, gives an all round view of performance across many environments and workload profiles, from transactions to decision support or search. OpenLink also has extensive experience in developing scale-out parallel database technology.

The Open PHACTS Foundation
The Open PHACTS Foundation is the successor organisation of the Open PHACTS project, and aims to ensure the sustainability of the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform infrastructure. OPF also acts as a hub for scientific research and development relevant to the life sciences, and serves as a unique forum for the scientific community, allowing idea exchange between the pharmaceutical industry, academia and SMEs. OPF is a UK-based not-for-profit membership organisation, but operates in an international commercial environment.

Almirall S.A.
Almirall is a pharmaceutical company committed to provide valuable medicines through their own R&D efforts, licenses and collaborations. Through seeking innovative medicines they aim to become a relevant player in respiratory and dermatology diseases with also a strong interest in gastroenterology and pain. The company was founded in 1943 and is headquartered in Barcelona, Spain. It has 14 affiliates in Europe and North America and trading capacity in 22 countries.

SciBite Limited
SciBite is an informatics SME focusing on competitor intelligence and text-mining within the life sciences. SciBite uses innovative approaches to deal with the complexity of mining language in the biomedical domain. SciBite’s text-mining engine can be configured to a variety of different use cases and performs with very high throughput. SciBite has a number of big-pharma and scientific publishers as current customers.

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