U-BIOPRED knowledge portal wins best practices award
The tranSMART Foundation, U-BIOPRED and eTRIKS have won the Bio-IT World Best Practices Award for the U-BIOPRED knowledge portal.
Led by the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, U-BIOPRED (unbiased biomarkers for the prediction of respiratory disease outcomes) is a severe asthma research project with multiple stakeholders and funded (€21m) by the EU’s Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).
It was comprised of longitudinal clinical (adult and paediatric) 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 ten 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 organise 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 €2bn investment.”
Ioannis Pandis, postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College, added: “The effort to establish the U-BIOPRED tranSMART platform required some dynamic thinking and collaboration on multiple levels. Complex translational research datasets are becoming the norm and it is efforts like these that are effectively sharing and analysing 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, whilst also ensuring full transparency to a multistakeholder project. This is the first real collaborative knowledge management platform in EU translational research. Its success inspired major investment to the knowledge management technology and service support in the EU IMI programme through the funding of eTRIKS and EMIF projects, totalling €100m for five years.
