OpenPHACTS

Open PHACTS (Open Pharmacological Concept Triple Store) was a European initiative public–private partnership between academia, publishers, enterprises, pharmaceutical companies and other organisations working to enable better, cheaper and faster drug discovery.^[1][2][3][4] It has been funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative,^[5] selected as part of three projects to "design methods for common standards and sharing of data for more efficient drug development and patient treatment in the future".^[6][7]

Open PHACTS

Formation	2011
Type	Public–private partnership
Purpose	Semantic interoperability for drug discovery through Open innovation
Membership	27 member organisations
Key people	Antony John Williams Carole Goble Barend Mons Gerhard Ecker
Website	www.openphacts.org github.com/openphacts

Partnerships

A total of 27 partners were involved including:

• Academia: Maastricht University, University of Santiago de Compostela, University of Vienna, University of Manchester, University of Bonn, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, European Bioinformatics Institute, Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, Technical University of Denmark, University of Hamburg
• Pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer, Merck KGaA, Eli Lilly and Company, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca
• Other companies: ChemSpider, Biovia, Eagle Genomics, Entagen
• Publishers: Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomson Reuters

Drug discovery

The Open Pharmacological Space created by the consortium intended to support open innovation and in-house non-public drug discovery research^[8] by removing bottlenecks in drug development.^[9][10] Resources from the project are publicly available on GitHub.^[11]

To reduce the barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia and for small businesses, the Open PHACTS consortium built the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform. This platform was freely available, integrating pharmacological data from a variety of information resources and providing tools and services to question this integrated data to support pharmacological research.

References

1. Williams, A. J.; Harland, L.; Groth, P.; Pettifer, S.; Chichester, C.; Willighagen, E. L.; Evelo, C. T.; Blomberg, N.; Ecker, G.; Goble, C.; Mons, B. (2012). "Open PHACTS: Semantic interoperability for drug discovery". Drug Discovery Today. 17 (21–22): 1188–1198. doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2012.05.016. PMID 22683805.
2. Ecker, G. F.; Williams-Jones, B. (2012). "Open Innovation in Drug Discovery". Molecular Informatics. 31 (8): 519–520. doi:10.1002/minf.201280004. PMID 27477598.
3. Gray, Alasdair J.G.; Groth, Paul; Loizou, Antonis; Askjaer, Sune; Brenninkmeijer, Christian; Burger, Kees; Chichester, Christine; Evelo, Chris T.; Goble, Carole; Harland, Lee; Pettifer, Steve; Thompson, Mark; Waagmeester, Andra; Williams, Antony John (2014). "Applying linked data approaches to pharmacology: Architectural decisions and implementation". Semantic Web. 5 (2): 101–113. arXiv:1005.2643. doi:10.3233/SW-2012-0088.
4. Ciccarese, P; Soiland-Reyes, S; Belhajjame, K; Gray, A. J.; Goble, C; Clark, T (2013). "PAV ontology: Provenance, authoring and versioning". Journal of Biomedical Semantics. 4 (1): 37. arXiv:1304.7224. doi:10.1186/2041-1480-4-37. PMC 4177195. PMID 24267948.
5. "Open PHACTS at IMI - The Innovative Medicines Initiative".
6. Watson, R. (2011). "Europe provides €172m for research into innovative medicines". BMJ. 342: d1577. doi:10.1136/bmj.d1577. PMID 21393337. S2CID 40608990.
7. Goble, C.; Gray, A. J. G.; Harland, L.; Karapetyan, K.; Loizou, A.; Mikhailov, I.; Rankka, Y. N.; Senger, S.; Tkachenko, V.; Williams, A. J.; Willighagen, E. L. (2013). "Incorporating Commercial and Private Data into an Open Linked Data Platform for Drug Discovery". Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 8219. pp. 65–80. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-41338-4_5. ISBN 978-3-642-41337-7.
8. Müller, S.; Weigelt, J. (2010). "Open-access public-private partnerships to enable drug discovery--new approaches". IDrugs: The Investigational Drugs Journal. 13 (3): 175–180. PMID 20191434.
9. Dalgleish, R.; Molero, E.; Kidd, R.; Jansen, M.; Past, D.; Robl, A.; Mons, B.; Diaz, C.; Mons, A.; Brookes, A. J. (2012). "Solving bottlenecks in data sharing in the life sciences". Human Mutation. 33 (10): 1494–1496. doi:10.1002/humu.22123. PMID 22623360.
10. Mons, B.; Van Haagen, H.; Chichester, C.; Hoen, P. B. 'T.; Den Dunnen, J. T.; Van Ommen, G.; Van Mulligen, E.; Singh, B.; Hooft, R.; Roos, M.; Hammond, J.; Kiesel, B.; Giardine, B.; Velterop, J.; Groth, P.; Schultes, E. (2011). "The value of data". Nature Genetics. 43 (4): 281–283. doi:10.1038/ng0411-281. PMID 21445068.
11. "Open PHACTS on GitHub". GitHub. Retrieved 2012-07-10.