EU-ToxRisk knowledge infrastructure - effective sharing of data, results and knowledge

We will discuss knowledge sharing infrastructure supporting reproducible science on the EU-ToxRisk program for Toxicity Testing and Risk Assessment for the 21st century in the Poster presentation (P06-113) at the Eurotox meeting in Helsinki, 9 September 2019

Authors

T. Exner (1), A. Herse (2), D. Bachler(1), M. Brajnik(1), L. Farcal(1), U. Sarkans(2), M. Pastor(3), B. Hardy (1)

(1) Edelweiss Connect GmbH, Basel, Switzerland

(2) EMBL-EBI, Hinxton, United Kingdom

(3) University Pompeu Fabra, Research Program on Biomedical Informatics, Barcelona, Spain

EU-ToxRisk – An Integrated European ‘Flagship’ Programme Driving Mechanism-based Toxicity Testing and Risk Assessment for the 21st century – is a European collaborative project funded by the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020. Its complex structure with almost 40 partners requires effective solution for sharing of data, knowledge and tools, first between consortium partners and later with the complete scientific community. The Knowledge Infrastructure (KI) of EU-ToxRisk is designed as a one-stop shop effectively organising data and knowledge sharing and facilitating the usage of in silico prediction and risk assessment workflows. It builds the link between, on the one hand, the data and tool providers and, on the other hand, the read-across experts and risk assessors as the consumers of the data and users of the provided tools, In this way, it is supporting the ambitious goal to generate new testing strategies and read-across applications for the assessment of human health risks that are based solely on in vitro and in silico new approach methods (NAMs).

To be able to serve the requirements of all stakeholders, the KI consists of different modules that include long-term data storage solutions, linked visualization and modelling tools, test methods and in silico method repositories, case studies and Adverse Outcome Pathway collaborative sections. One of its central components is the ToxDataExplorer, which makes project data centrally stored on BioStudies, the EU resource for data capturing and storing, available via advanced application programming interfaces. This technology allows customized searching and filtering even across different datasets and enables a direct access and use of the data in a wide range of analysis or modelling workflows (e.g. KNIME) and programming languages (e.g. R, Python).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 681002.