Open PHACTS (Open Pharmacological Concept

Triple Store A triplestore or RDF store is a purpose-built database for the storage and retrieval of triples through semantic queries. A triple is a data entity composed of subject–predicate–object, like "Bob is 35" or "Bob knows Fred". Much like a relati ...

) was a European initiative

public–private partnership A public–private partnership (PPP, 3P, or P3) is a long-term arrangement between a government and private sector institutions.Hodge, G. A and Greve, C. (2007), Public–Private Partnerships: An International Performance Review, Public Administ ...

between academia, publishers, enterprises,

pharmaceutical companies The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate sympto ...

and other organisations working to enable better, cheaper and faster

drug discovery In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by ...

. It has been funded by the

Innovative Medicines Initiative The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is a European initiative to improve the competitive situation of the European Union in the field of pharmaceutical research. The IMI is a joint initiative ( public-private partnership) of the DG Resear ...

, 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".

Partnerships

A total of 27 partners were involved including: * Academia:

Maastricht University Maastricht University (abbreviated as UM; nl, Universiteit Maastricht) is a public research university in Maastricht, Netherlands. Founded in 1976, it is the second youngest of the thirteen Dutch universities. In 2021, 22,383 students studied a ...

University of Santiago de Compostela The University of Santiago de Compostela - USC ( gl, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela - USC, es, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela - USC) is a public university located in the city of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. A second ...

University of Vienna The University of Vienna (german: Universität Wien) is a public research university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world. With its long and rich h ...

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

University of Bonn The Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn (german: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was founded in its present form as the ( en, Rhine ...

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit foundation which federates bioinformatics activities throughout Switzerland. The institute was established on 30 March 1998 and its mission is to provide core bioinfor ...

European Bioinformatics Institute The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an Intergovernmental Organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the We ...

Vrije Universiteit The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, being founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research ...

of Amsterdam,

Technical University of Denmark The Technical University of Denmark ( da, Danmarks Tekniske Universitet), often simply referred to as DTU, is a polytechnic university and school of engineering. It was founded in 1829 at the initiative of Hans Christian Ørsted as Denmark's fir ...

University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...

* Pharmaceutical companies:

Pfizer Pfizer Inc. ( ) is an American multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation headquartered on 42nd Street in Manhattan, New York City. The company was established in 1849 in New York by two German entrepreneurs, Charles Pfize ...

Merck KGaA The Merck Group, branded and commonly known as Merck, is a German multinational science and technology company headquartered in Darmstadt, with about 60,000 employees and present in 66 countries. The group includes around 250 companies; the ma ...

Eli Lilly and Company Eli Lilly and Company is an American pharmaceutical company headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, with offices in 18 countries. Its products are sold in approximately 125 countries. The company was founded in 1876 by, and named after, Colon ...

Novartis Novartis AG is a Swiss-American multinational pharmaceutical corporation based in Basel, Switzerland and Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (global research).name="novartis.com">https://www.novartis.com/research-development/research-loc ...

GlaxoSmithKline GSK plc, formerly GlaxoSmithKline plc, is a British Multinational corporation, multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with global headquarters in London, England. Established in 2000 by a Mergers and acquisitions, merger of Gl ...

AstraZeneca AstraZeneca plc () is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company with its headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, England. It has a portfolio of products for major diseases in areas includ ...

* Other companies:

ChemSpider ChemSpider is a database of chemicals. ChemSpider is owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Database The database contains information on more than 100 million molecules from over 270 data sources including: * EPA DSSTox * U.S. Food and D ...

Biovia BIOVIA is a software company headquartered in the United States, with representation in Europe and Asia. It provides software for chemical, materials and bioscience research for the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, consumer packaged goods, aerospa ...

, Eagle Genomics, Entagen * Publishers:

Royal Society of Chemistry The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is a learned society (professional association) in the United Kingdom with the goal of "advancing the chemistry, chemical sciences". It was formed in 1980 from the amalgamation of the Chemical Society, the Ro ...

Thomson Reuters Thomson Reuters Corporation ( ) is a Canadian multinational media conglomerate. The company was founded in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where it is headquartered at the Bay Adelaide Centre. Thomson Reuters was created by the Thomson Corp ...

Drug discovery

The Open Pharmacological Space created by the consortium intended to support

open innovation Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy#Computing, secrecy and information silo, silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving force ...

and in-house non-public drug discovery research by removing bottlenecks in

drug development Drug development is the process of bringing a new pharmaceutical drug to the market once a lead compound has been identified through the process of drug discovery. It includes preclinical research on microorganisms and animals, filing for r ...

. Resources from the project are publicly available on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

. 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

{{DEFAULTSORT:Open PHACTS Information technology organizations based in Europe Drug discovery Medical databases