Members of the Pistoia Alliance collaborated to overcome pesky technical difficulties at the Annual General Meeting on 12 September 2011. John Wise summarized the current project portfolio, and Nick Trigg of new-member Constellation Technologies initiated a lively discussion about the benefits of Pistoia Alliance membership. The new board of directors was also announced. Congratulations to new board members Ingrid Akerblom (Merck & Co), Christoph Brockel (Pfizer), Frank Brown (Accelrys), Sean Ekins (Collaborative Drug Discovery), and Jason Swift (AstraZeneca).

Get introduced to the new board of directors »

Download the AGM presentation »

Today is the deadline for responding to the Phase 2 RFP. Proposals will be presented and formally reviewed by the project team in teleconferences on 3 and 5 October 2011. Projects selected to receive shared-risk funding will be notified by the end of October.

Members of the sequence services team have also launched the Pistoia Alliance Sequence Squeeze Competition, which will award $15,000 to the best, novel, open-source compression algorithm for gene sequence data. Four prestigious judges have been recruited to evaluate entries: Guy Coates (Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), Jun Wang (BGI), Matthew Trunnel (Broad Institute), and Pistoia's own Nick Lynch.

Check out the Sequence Squeeze Competition »

Read FAQs on Sequence Services Phase 2 »

SESL

The SESL project public demonstrator for brokering gene data associated with Type 2 diabetes has been completed. SESL project lead Ian Harrow will participate in the Open PHACTS/GEN2PHEN workshop on 19-20 September 2011 to explore the feasibility of collaborating with OpenPHACTS to evolve the SESL concepts into a fully functional knowledge brokering service. Ian will also be sharing the impacts and learnings of this project at the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo Europe. When not on tour with SESL, Ian and the rest of the team are working on two papers for publication about the project. The SESL website will contain the latest updates on the project.

Access SESL public demonstrator »

Read more about SESL »

Vocabulary Services

Lee Harland has been leading the effort to develop the Vocabulary Services Initiative (VSI) working group, ably supported by Ian Dix and Sorana Popa (AstraZeneca). A paper titled "Empowering Industrial Research with Shared Biomedical Vocabularies" is to be published in Drug Discovery Today - most likely in the November 2011 issue. Support and funding is needed to develop VSI's ideas into specific projects.

Learn more about VSI »

Pistoia Alliance Information Ecosystem Workshop »

10 October 2011, Hannover, Germany

Bio-ITWorld Conference and Expo Europe »

11-13 October 2011, Hannover, Germany
Ian Harrow, SESL project lead, presents "Toward a Brokering Framework for Knowledge-Based Services: Learning from the Pistoia Alliance SESL Pilot."

Pharma Cloud World Europe 2011 »

7-10 November 2011, London, UK

Ashley George, Pistoia Alliance treasurer, and John Wise, executive director, are both presenting at this conference.

Next Generation Sequencing Congress »

14-15 November 2011, London, UK
Simon Thornber, sequence services working group lead, presents "How big Pharma's IT departments are responding to the challenge of NGS by working more closely with each other."

Nick Lynch posted two entries recently on the subject of innovation. Two Perspectives on Innovation discusses the Pistoia Alliance's recent article in Drug Discovery World in the context of a report in by The Economist on innovation. Innovation Requires More Than More of the Same dialogues with Barry Bunin of CDD about the importance of collaboration and the specific role the Pistoia Alliance aims to play in bringing constituents together. This dialogue has also led to a lively discussion on the Pistoia Alliance LinkedIn group. We'd love more input on this conversation!

Read the conversation on LinkedIn »

More blog posts »

ELNs--An Essential Productivity Tool--But Which to Use? »

European Pharmaceutical Review, Issue 4, 2011

What Are the Obstacles to Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry? »

Drug Discovery World, Summer 2011

More News »