Where life science
Collaborates
We are a global, not-for-profit members’ organization working to lower barriers to innovation in life science and healthcare R&D through pre-competitive collaboration.
Boston, 25 February, 2020 The Pistoia Alliance, a global,...
Our projects transform R&D innovation through pre-competitive collaboration. We bring together the key constituents to identify the root causes that lead to R&D inefficiencies. We develop best practices and technology pilots to overcome common obstacles.
A collaborative project aiming to make bioassay information available in a FAIR format to increase the efficiency of bench scientists engaged in experiment planning and enable research that currently requires tedious expert literature review.
There are over one million biological assay protocols published to-date. Biological assay is a popular data type for post-hoc data mining for research program planning, but most assay descriptions are not in a suitable form. It is expected that making assay information available in a FAIR format would increase the efficiency of bench scientists engaged in experiment planning and enable research that currently requires tedious expert literature review. The common data model can simplify data-sharing in collaborative research and publishing of research results. At this time most of the pharmaceutical businesses already have internal programs for conversion of assay protocols into a FAIR format. The effort for annotation of public assay protocols in these internal programs is therefore duplicated. Shifting the annotation of these public assays to a collaborative project would result in immediate cost savings to the member companies.
We will create a data product that would provide bioassay protocol information in a machine-readable FAIR form ready for data mining. Since the largest global pharmaceutical companies support this effort, the resulting data model, data ingestion business processes, and software would become de-facto industry standards that would further facilitate data sharing and collaboration.
We will use Natural Language Processing in combination with manual review of automatically produced assay annotations. Specific technologies will be selected in the pilot phase in the coming months.
To support the implementation of the FAIR guiding principles for the data management cycle by Life Science industry, through sharing best practices and provision of a FAIR Toolkit.
As the life sciences industry continues to transform digitally, the sector needs clear and practical guidance on how data and relevant metadata is captured and managed to foster greater collaboration and more effective partnerships. The FAIR guiding principles help to meet this need, but many companies are struggling to implement the guiding principles as discussed by Wise and co-authors (DOI:10.1016/j.drudis.2019.01.008). This practical need will be addressed by the development of the FAIR Toolkit which will consist of relevant methods and case studies.
The Pistoia FAIR Toolkit will include methods and case studies to support the implementation of the FAIR data management life cycle by life science industry. The methods will include selected tools, tips, FAQs, training materials and change management which will be illustrated by relevant case studies. The FAIR Toolkit will be assembled together on a user-friendly and freely accessible web site.
The project team will collect candidate content in a simple wiki and select the most relevant content to support implementation of FAIR by scientists in life science industry. This will lead to the specification, design and implementation of a FAIR Toolkit web site serving as a “one-stop shop”. This is expected to work much like the Pistoia UXLS Toolkit (uxls.org), which will be a useful reference for building the FAIR Toolkit website.
We are a community of practitioners from the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and software industries. We have launched the User Experience (UX) for Life Sciences (LS) project to enable business to adopt UX principles and methods as they develop scientific software. Our first deliverable will be a toolkit.
UX is a powerful tool for supporting the creation of effective and usable interfaces. Whilst UX is relatively widespread, the full potential of UX is still to be realised in the life sciences. The goal of this project is to empower life science professionals to get the most from these UX resources.
This project aims to enable UX in the R&D life sciences through engagement with a wider audience including stakeholders such as senior management. Our vision is to communicate the value added by UX at all levels of our organisations.
The project has built a toolkit which focus’s on issues faced in developing digital products specifically for R&D in the life science and healthcare environments. The UXLS toolkit includes UX techniques, methods and business-critical metrics.
