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New Partners started in TRANSLOCATION WP6

The IMI consortium TRANSLOCATION is very happy to announce the addition of The Hyve and GRITsystems as new partners in the project. The new partners will be building the core infrastructure of the information centre by linking a ported version of the preclinical data management system LSP with the translational system tranSMART.

In the original TRANSLOCATION DoW, the open source tool tranSMART was suggested as a solution capable of handling all data types that would be warehoused in the ND4BB Information Centre. During evaluation of the tool two drawbacks of tranSMART were identified:

  • it does not support compound-centric data handling.
  • cross-study evaluation for pre-clinical and clinical data is not supported out of the box

In conclusion, enhancements to tranSMART are required to build a fully functional repository for ND4BB. Nevertheless, tranSMART is expected to become the standard for multiple public and private translational informatics systems within the next years. The limited resources within TRANSLOCATION did not allow the development of the required additional functionality. Other approaches had to be evaluated.

During the first months, the WP6 team intensively surveyed and engaged multiple technical solution providers to find the best capability that can meet our timelines within budget to support and enable the ND4BB InfoCentre User Requirement Specification. In excess of 100 informatics packages and solution providers were assessed. No supplier could demonstrate a comprehensive solution. It was concluded that partnering with small complementary organisations, each with deep expertise in developing open source based software for the pharmaceutical industry or academic translational research organisations was the optimal way forward.

The optimal partners were thus identified as The Hyve (founded in 2011, experts in tranSMART development and data management from its start as open source project) and GRITsystems (founded in 2014, providers of LSP, an industry Open Source based Discovery/pre-clinical informatics platform since 2000).

The Hyve and GRITsystems will be part of the team responsible for building the core infrastructure of the information centre. The approach taken will be to link a ported version of the preclinical data management system LSP with the translational informatics tool tranSMART. The advantages of this approach are better support for compound-centric data handling and unique capabilities for cross-study evaluation of pre-clinical and clinical data, a requirement which is not supported by tranSMART “out of the box”.

Following workshops with experts from the eTRIKS consortium, a roadmap was devised for the creation of the InfoCentre. The main goal is to add data management capabilities to the eTRIKS instance of tranSMART to deal with early development data. This will be achieved by combining the tranSMART core datawarehouse with a ported version of the already established datawarehouse LSP, a fit for purpose capability to properly manage handling early research/development data. This proposal has been aligned and endorsed by the eTRIKS consortium.

Enhancements to tranSMART will be made to create a fully functional repository for ND4BB. The excellent alignment between the technical solutions pursued by eTRIKS and ND4BB will ensure efficient use of resources, appropriate standardisation and increase the overall sustainability of the ND4BB InfoCentre resources over the longer term.