Most relevant issues in 2017
The Biomedical Informatics Research Group (GRIB) has wide-ranging experience in participation and coordination of research projects in the field of Bioinformatics, funded by the European Commission and other research funding agencies. It also has a long tradition of collaboration with the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry within the framework of R&D projects and providing services, especially in the development of computational methods for drug discovery and toxicity assessment.
At the end of 2017, the programme was coordinating two large scale scientific initiatives:
• The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) project eTRANSAFE (2017-2022): Enhancing Translational Safety Assessment through Integrative Knowledge Management aims to develop an advanced data integration infrastructure together with innovative computational methods to improve safety in drug development processes. (2017-2022).
• The H2020 project MedBioinformatics (2015-2018) on the translational and clinical application of bioinformatics.
The group is also a partner in other EU-funded projects, such as the ongoing IMI projects:
• TransQST: Translational Quantitative Systems Toxicology, which aims to develop novel computational approaches using the best available data from the public and private domains to address the problems of drug safety.
• EMIF: European Medical Information Network, which aims to develop a common information framework of patient-level data that will link up and facilitate access to diverse medical and research data sources, opening up new avenues of research for scientists.
• iPiE: Intelligence Led Assessment of Pharmaceuticals in the Environment, which aims to develop a predictive framework for the environmental impact of drugs.
And the ongoing H2020 projects:
• EU-ToxRisk, which aims to achieve a paradigm shift in toxicology towards a more efficient and animal-free chemical safety assessment.
• ESCAPE – NET: European Sudden Cardiac Arrest Network: towards Prevention, Education and New Treatment.
• ELIXIR-EXCELERATE, to accelerate the implementation of Europe's life-science data infrastructure.
The research activities of GRIB have led to the creation of several spin-off companies such as BioCloud (2015), Acellera (2007), Chemotargets (2006) and Pharmatools (2002), and the development of commercial and open-source scientific software. See http://grib.imim.es/software-services/software/ for further details.
Some of the international events organized in 2017 with GRIB involvement were:
• 2nd European Conference on Translational Bioinformatics (ECTB 2017) within the framework of the MedBioinformatics project coordinated by the GRIB. Wellcome Genome Campus, UK, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, 12-13 June 2017 (Ferran Sanz, Organizing Committee).
•10th Annual Conference of Biomedical Research Technological Platforms. Barcelona, 7-8 March 2017. (Ferran Sanz, Organizing Committee).
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