Consortium

eTRIKS is the result of a collaboration between 17 different partners. Further information about each member’s roles are available in the Partners section of this website.

Translational Research Knowledge Management Service provision

All partners bring extensive experience in KM service provision. Janssen in particular have delivered tranSMART across their organisation and within other Pharma and Medical Centres. Strong clinical and scientific input from Bayer, Sanofi and Lundbeck will significantly enhance the scientific value of the service. Imperial has a long history in building KM systems for TR projects through its engagement in IMI/U-BIOPRED together with CNRS, Welcome Trust/BAIR and RCUK/I-Health projects; UL through managing a bioinformatics core facility and through its expertise in developing/supporting a variety of KM services at EMBL; CNRS has rich experience in analytical tools for TR research, and its CC-IN2P3 data and computing centre provides one of the largest academic high-performance computing and cloud infrastructures in Europe; IDBS is the world’s largest provider of TR solutions. Such combined expertise ensures quality of the service provision. Community Outreach is a critical activity for eTRIKS and will benefit from the EFPIA partners’ rich experience in IMI project engagement in the pre-competitive domain. EFPIA partners include Janssen, Merck, AZ, Lilly, Lundbeck, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Bayer and GSK.

Translational Research Knowledge Management Research

The academic partners have extensive industrial experience of applied TR KM research. Prof Guo’s company InforSense was the first in the world to deliver a TR KM solution in 2006. Since then he and his team have nurtured a strong relationship with Pharma industry, including most of the EFPIA partners in this consortium. Since 2009, Imperial has deployed a cloud-based instance of tranSMART in partnership with Janssen for U-BIOPRED, tested it successfully with CNRS. Dr Schneider was co-founder of LION bioscience, and has developed various applications and services based on text mining, semantic web technologies, visualization tools and workflow KM systems. Janssen is the originator, developer and sponsor of the tranSMART platform. This rich internal expertise of tranSMART is enhanced by Roche, AZ, GSK, Pfizer and Sanofi, who are investigating the application of tranSMART internally. Dr Munro from IDBS has designed several widely used TR KM systems since he was Director of TM at InforSense. This combined expertise ensures quality of the system and its interoperability with a wide range of applications and data sources for the eTRIKS platform.

Curation

UL, Imperial and CNRS have been engaged in a large number of data curation projects for more than 15 years, including recently U-BIOPRED and BAIR. Imperial has developed the entire curation process for the U-BIOPRED research data with its related experiment meta-data and clinical information. This process has been successfully used and will form the base for the eTRIKS curation process. UL has experience on text analysis and the use of semantics for text based processing. The EFPIA expertise from Sanofi, J&J, Roche, Merck Serono and Pfizer comes from their involvement in many internal data curation projects.

Data Standards

CDISC, IDBS and Oxford bring experience in scientific data curation, software engineering, omics and biomedical standards. CDISC as an organisation is entirely committed to delivering internationally adopted data standards, especially in clinical research. Oxford members are leaders in the area of community-driven standards and are also involved in centres of the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative and in the ELIXIR-UK Node and many others. Strong standards experience in Pharma is gained from Roche, Merck Serono and other eTRIKS EFPIA partners.

International Impact

The consortium has a wide collaboration with research institutions in TR and medicine with strong partnerships with world leading institutes in Seattle (Prof Hood), Rochester MN USA (Mayo Clinic, Prof Kocher), Shanghai (Prof Chen) and Tokyo (Prof Kitano). Prof Rudi Balling played a guiding role in many international and European-wide ESFRI initiatives and projects such as EATRIS, ECRIN & ELIXIR. In addition all the EFPIA partners are global companies with internal TR investments across the EU, US and Asia Pacific enabling global input and dissemination of this project.

Ethics

The EFPIA partners are expert with regards to consenting and managing patients in clinical trials across the world, providing the consortium with a strong understanding of, and the ability to adhere to pertinent ethics policies, a critical component of the project that will be led by CNRS and Sanofi. Sanofi, Bayer, Roche, GSK and AZ will all bring internal expertise in data privacy and ethics compliance to the project as well as considerable experience and existing involvement in projects like IMI Oncotrack and U-BIOPRED. This will be complemented by Dr. Charles Auffray (CNRS), an authority in bioethics and intellectual property rights with over 20 years of experience in the field. In addition, a full time experienced Ethical Manager will be recruited by CNRS to ensure compliance of the eTRIKS platform usage with international regulations on data security and privacy, and biomedical ethics.

Governance

Finally, we have developed a governance structure that effectively integrates the EFPIA and academic/SME members. This structure promotes each member’s sustained involvement, accountability and responsibility and provision of expertise. With the governance model in place, the eTRIKS consortium effort will provide accurate and transparent reporting of both its operations and deliverables.