We are delighted to invite you to the workshop Managing Knowledge about Tissues, which will be held this 30–31 October 2013 in Brussels, Belgium.

The workshop is jointly organised by partners on the IMI projects DDMoRe, Open PHACTS and eTox, and hosted by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). This event will address the challenge of encoding, organizing, classifying and sharing knowledge about tissues in support of pharmaceutical R&D. In particular, this workshop will focus 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).

To that end, the two primary activities of this workshop are to:

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.

We hope that you will accept our invitation and very much look forward to your contribution. Please register your interest in participating to Tissue.KM.workshop@imi.europa.eu before 20 September 2013.