Annual Scientific Report 2015

Future plans
The Industry Programme will continue to adapt
and seek innovative methods of interaction with its
members, commensurate with the increasingly global
nature of the industries they represent. We will build
on the success of our industry interactions through
regular meetings and workshops held at EMBL-EBI and
at member sites, seeing our interactions with industry
partners becoming stronger as we work together to
address shared challenges and opportunities created
by Big Data in all the life sciences. In addition to finding
cost-effective paradigms to manage expanding volumes
of data, we will collaborate to establish methods to
ensure the appropriate integration of information
and computational models so that the confidentiality
of proprietary, licensed and personal information is
protected in a manner that promotes innovation and
translation into practical benefits.
Through efforts such as the Innovative Medicines
Initiative and the Pistoia Alliance, we are keen to
influence, support and encourage this integration
through direct involvement in EU-funded projects
and in the development of industry-driven data
and information standards. Continuing these close
co-operations will also be beneficial to the success of
ELIXIR, the pan-European infrastructure for
biological information.
Industry workshops
• In silico ADMET prediction
• Immunogenomics
• Translational NGS
• Enabling the translational bioinformatician
• Quantitative systems pharmacology
• Data enhancement through scientific literature: integrating
the literature with data to enable discovery
• The EMBL-EBI RDF Platform
• Electronic Medical Records for Drug Discovery:
Connectivity Map and LINCS (organised in association
with The Broad Institute)
Dominic Clark
Industry Programme
PhD in Medical Informatics, University of Wales,
1988. Imperial Cancer Research Fund, 1987–1995.
United Kingdom Bioinformatics Manager,
GlaxoWellcome R&D Ltd., 1995–1999. Vice
President, Informatics, Pharmagene, 1999–2001.
Managing Consultant, Sagentia Ltd., 2001-2009.
At EMBL-EBI since 2006.
Innovative Medicines
Initiative projects
Our programme helps its partners and EMBL-EBI researchers
establish collaborations in the context of the Innovative
Medicines Initiative. Examples include:
• EBiSC: European Bank for induced-pluripotent Stem Cells
• eTOX: Developing innovative in silico strategies and novel
software tools to better predict the toxicological profiles of
small molecules in early stages of the drug development
pipeline.
• EMTRAIN: A platform for education and training covering
the whole life cycle of medicines research, from basic science
through clinical development to pharmacovigilance.
• DDMoRe: The Drug Disease Model Resources consortium:
Developing a public drug and disease model library.
• EHR4CR: Designing a scalable and cost-effective approach
to interoperability between electronic health record systems
and clinical research.
• EU-AIMS: A large-scale drug-discovery collaboration
that brings together academic and industrial R&D with
patient organisations to develop and assess novel treatment
approaches for autism.
• EMIF: Developing a common information framework of
patient-level data that will link up and facilitate access to
diverse medical and research data sources.
• Open PHACTS, the Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple
Store: Reducing barriers to drug discovery in industry,
academia and for small businesses.
Selected publication
Hendrickx DM, Aerts HJ, Caiment F, et al. (2015) diXa:
a data infrastructure for chemical safety assessment.
Bioinformatics 31:1505-1507
2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report 152