Annual Scientific Report 2015

Industry, Innovation and Translation
EMBL-EBI supports researchers in biobusiness in a number of ways: directly
through the provision of services and infrastructure, and indirectly by facilitating
pre-competitive collaboration. Indeed, industry users of our services account for
up to a quarter of data and tools usage.
Our collaborations with industry partners have
increased significantly in recent years, most markedly
with pre-competitive initiatives supporting drug
development in large pharmaceutical companies.
This has been made possible by the availability of
collaborative working space within the EMBL-EBI
South Building, funded through a large grant from the
UK Government’s Large Facilities Capital Fund in 2011
under the auspices of its Office of Business, Innovation
and Skills.
Innovation and translation
The first of our Innovation & Translation activities,
Open Targets (formerly the CTTV), launched its
Target Validation platform in 2015, helping scientists
discover and prioritise evidence-based relationships
between targets and diseases. At its launch the service
provided evidence for over 21 800 therapeutic targets
spanning more than 8800 diseases and phenotypes.
This comprehensive data service was built based on
user-experience research, ensuring it is fit for purpose
for wet- and dry-lab scientists alike, and in its first six
weeks had over 9000 visits.
Originally formed by GSK, the Wellcome Trust Sanger
Institute and EMBL-EBI, Open Targets fosters
deep, on-going interactions between academic and
industry members for the purpose of developing open,
transformative approaches to selecting and validating
novel targets in drug development. Following the
interim directorship of Ewan Birney, Jeffrey Barrett
of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute was appointed
Director of the partnership in 2015.
EMBL-EBI’s role in the design, development and
implementation of the Target Validation platform
cannot be understated. For example, the Samples,
Phenotypes and Ontologies team enhanced and
integrated ontology services and content supporting
disease annotations, making it possible for this public–
private partnership to integrate rare and common
diseases according to shared phenotype. Our Web
Development team led user-experience research as well
as website design, development and deployment.
In all, 60 EMBL-EBI staff work on some 30 Open
Targets projects, which range from computational
pipelines to oncology, induced-pluripotent stem cells
and single-cell genomics. Results of the experimental
systems set up in 2015 are expected to be published
during 2016.
Industry programme
We were very pleased to welcome Astex
Pharmaceuticals, part of Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, as a
new member of the Industry Programme in December
2015. Our Programme provided neutral ground for
bioinformatics specialists in large companies to meet
and address shared challenges, at quarterly meetings
and 10 member-driven workshops with topics ranging
from immunogenomics to Semantic Web applications.
In 2015 our Industry Programme organised a
two-day workshop in Argentina, EMBL’s newest
associate member state. In collaboration with the
Argentine Ministry of Science, Technology and
Productive Innovation and the Argentine Chamber
of Biotechnology, we delivered an event focussed
on applications of bioinformatics and genomics in
healthcare, agriculture and livestock breeding.
Industry workshops
The Target Validation Platform,
launched in 2015, is designed based
on user-experience research.
www.targetvalidation.org
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2015 EMBL-EBI Annual Scientific Report