Date: 10th-12th of February 2015
Location: Porta Fira Hotel Barcelona
Seventy eight delegates attended eTRIKS 2nd annual meeting on the 10-12th of February 2015 in Barcelona. With eight major pharmaceutical companies, six key academic centres, several small to medium enterprises and nine supported projects represented, the eTRIKS collaboration reviewed achievements, sought user insights, and highlighted key initiatives planned for the coming years.
Key achievements of our 2nd year of operation
The release of tranSMART 1.2 / eTRIKS 2.0 has been a major step forward in translational information handling. We now have a platform that provides greater functionality, reliability and consistency, born from work carried out by eTRIKS developers and others in the development community. By developing the code of practice for secondary use of medical data in scientific research, WP7 of the eTRIKS project now leads the way in providing guidelines and training to enable IMI projects to address their cross-border issues for complying with personal data protection regulations. The standards starter pack is now available on the eTRIKS website and provides EU projects guidelines on the use and employment of data standards. Complimentary to this, eTRIKS is continuing to on a master tree structure and has made over 40 public datasets available on the public server.
Supported and Prospective Projects
eTRIKS supported and prospective supported projects that took part in annual meeting discussions included: U-BIOPRED, OncoTrack, Precisesads, Safe-T, Bioaster, Approach, ABIRISK, RA-MAP and Predict TB. Representatives of these projects formed a panel that was asked a series of questions with a view to ascertain alignment between the projects.
The panel provided a list of key requirements they would expect to see from the eTRIKS platform including:
- Data sustainability
- Accessibility
- Usability
- Analytics (access to or direction to)
- Data integration
Users of the eTRIKS platform want to learn how to better leverage the data they have. Harmonizing datasets was highlighted as essential, and community critical - the eTRIKS annual meeting was described as “a forum to discuss data aspects not discussed elsewhere”. There was a unanimous view between the supported projects that they would recommend eTRIKS to other projects that need help in managing their datasets, and key members of the IMI U-BIOPRED project where quoted as saying:
“Knowledge Management in U-BIOPRED without eTRIKS would have been like running a clinical trial without GCP.” Professor Peter Sterk of the University of Amsterdam
“eTRIKS provides gel without which we would be floating in pool of excess data with no direction.” Professor Ian Adcock of Imperial College London
Data harmonization and support for cross-study data integration
Already known to eTRIKS as a key requirement of its users, Ibrahim Emam of Imperial College London, presented his vision towards harmonizing supported project datasets. This approach will facilitate the incorporation of data into eTRIKS/tranSMART, and provide the ability for rich cross study data analysis.
Three key aspects of this approach include:
- A new meta data registry to support data harmonization curation procedures.
- A new data standards compliant repository for staging, harmonizing and archiving translational research data.
- A new tranSMART curation and ETL pipeline that improves data loading into tranSMART cross-trial data exploration feature.
eTRIKS collects use cases from all supported projects to enable the identification of the most complete way to leverage project data. This work described above will be a key initiative for eTRIKS in 2015, with eTRIKS personnel across three work packages collaborating to meet the aforementioned milestones to further enable eTRIKS users to get the most out of their data.
Mansoor Saqi of the CNRS-EISBM team in Lyon highlighted a plan to supply eTRIKS users a rich set of analytics that will be accessed through the eTRIKS repository, citing the following as key user requirements:
- Patient stratification: strategies for subtype identification using multiple ‘omics datasets
- Obtaining a mechanistic understanding of sub-types: using disease maps for providing contextual information
Providing supported projects even more resource
What happens to the data of supported projects after the eTRIKS collaboration ends? A sustainability plan current known as the “eTRIKS Network” has been proposed..
The eTRIKS Network is designed to scale eTRIKS services perpetually to a large number of client collaborations. Scott Wagers of BioSci Consulting proposed that elements of client support be provided by key project partners coordinated by a central outreach entity. This model will enable collaborations to plan and meet all aspect of their data management needs (hosting, application implementation, curation, agreement definition, etc.) efficiently, consistently and cost effectively. The eTRIKS Network concept has already garnered significant interest from prospective client projects.
Advisory Boards
eTRIKS employs three world-class advisory boards specifically set up to refine the eTRIKS vision, and to ensure that eTRIKS provides a world class service to the client projects. These advisory boards include:
- Standards Advisory Board (StAB) Lead by Michael Braxenthaler (Roche)
- Ethics and Security Advisory Board (ESAB) Lead by Charles Auffray (CNRS-EISBM)
- Strategic Advisory Board (SAB) Lead by Michael Barnes (WHRI)
Each advisory board met at the annual meeting providing guidance on every aspect of the eTRIKS project. The key take home point being:
“eTRIKS should focus on the value it can bring to the next generation of projects. ”
Project support and platform development will work simultaneously to the benefit of the supported customers. Focus will be on the technical and biologist user experiences with a clear role of eTRIKS in the data management landscape.
Cited challenges for the future of eTRIKS:
- Data harmonization through automated curation pipelines
- eTRIKS Network and sustainability plan implemented
- Speed of data access by supported projects improved
- Continuous availability of updated data standards and data privacy guidelines
- Recommendations for security compliance implementation and monitoring
- Roles and responsibilities of the study owners clarified
- Training for data ethics, standards and platform usage
- Securing the legacy of client project data
- Securing the technical resource for the supported projects
Annual Meeting Debrief – Jay Bergeron (Pfizer), eTRIKS Acting Coordinator
In its first two and a half years, eTRIKS has substantially advanced translational data management capabilities for collaborative programs both within and beyond the IMI. eTRIKS incorporated an open source database to create a fully open source application suite based on the tranSMART translational data warehouse. eTRIKS provides a comprehensive hosting service through the CNRS computing center and developed and applies consistent CDISC-based standards to speed data curation, hypothesis generation and data analysis. eTRIKS has established guidelines for securing and using patient data and assists client projects in becoming conscientious caretakers of these data. eTRIKS has directly served over ten client programs to date and provides code and documented learnings and knowledge openly to the research community. Moreover, eTRIKS provides curated public data to investigators through an open access deployment of eTRIKS/tranSMART and has enabled analytical methods to support client programs.
In the truest character of collaboration, eTRIKS associates with related academic and industry initiatives. eTRIKS personnel worked closely with the tranSMART Foundation, the TRaiT Consortium and many others to implement the most recent iteration of the tranSMART product, released by the tranSMART Foundation as “Version 1.2” (a.k.a. “eTRIKS 2.0” for the IMI). This tranSMART release provides a new level of capability and reliability that all tranSMART users can now enjoy. eTRIKS was the first organization to deploy the revised application for customers.
…And What’s next?
- Delivering for our existing customers
- Leveraging our combined capabilities established to date to impact new client projects with an additional focus on analytic products and services
- Driving a new approach to data curation and loading, the most time-intensive element of translational data management
- Establishing sustainable services for current and new clients that will exist beyond the end date of the collaboration
- Growing the talented members of the eTRIKS community who will become the next generation of translational research leaders
- Continuing to work with partner organizations that share the mission of facilitating translational research
It truly has been a magnificent two and half years. And with two and half years remaining until eTRIKS sunsets, there is ample time for further world class customer service, software virtuosity, information harmonization, analytical prowess and applied data integrity to drive new insights to promote the health and wellbeing of patients worldwide.
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