Niklas Blomberg, Director of ELIXIR, explains his involvement and collaborations in the project
What is your current role in eTRANSAFE?
I co-lead WP2 together with Esther Vock from BI. In WP2 we aim to provide the policies needed for project partners to embrace data sharing and open collaborations. We are also working with regulatory agencies to develop guidance documents to facilitate the regulatory use of computational safety assessment tools.
What is your overall vision of the project?
I would like eTRANSAFE to be the project that brings open, collaborative science into translational toxicology and drug safety assessments – a focal pint where the adoption of standards and data sharing guidelines will allow long-term collaborative efforts to model complex endpoints. And a project that leaves produces an important data set for the community which continues to be updated for years to come.
What do you find most challenging about the project?
eTRANSAFE aims to bring together a large number of organisations, many new data resources – including internal company data – in an open knowledge integration and modelling framework to make meaningful, new predictions for drug safety assents in on-going drug-discovery projects. And have guidelines acceptable to regulatory agencies. It may be better to ask what is not challenging in the project? However, in any large undertaking the hard part is often to get the interface and communications right between the different work packages – I think the use cases now agreed in eTRANSAFE are a really important tool to get this working and I really look forward to see the outcome of those in the coming months.