The 15CM took place on 9-10 of June 2022 at the H10 Marina Hotel in Barcelona, with the novelty of the first edition of the eTRANSAFE Awards.
After several virtual editions, the eTRANSAFE consortium members gathered again in Barcelona in June for the first face-to-face event since 2020.
The main aim of the meeting was to showcase the latest advances of the eTRANSAFE ToxHub platform and foster interaction between the developing team and the end-users. This was accomplished through a series of interactive use cases and workshops, which the meeting participants joined from their laptops.
With this philosophy, the meeting kicked-off with a pre-meeting session targeted at skilled programmers, followed by registration and a networking lunch, witnessing many long-awaited reunions of colleagues after the pandemic.
After welcome words from the project Executive Committee, the participants split into two use case groups focused on retrieval & visualisation of SEND data and preclinical-clinical translation. To maximize the learnings of these sessions, the outcomes and findings of each use case where afterwards discussed in a plenary session with all participants.
The meeting continued with simultaneous workshops, where project experts led hands-on exercises on text-mining, model building & retraining and on tools to foster preclinical data donation. The day concluded with an informal booth session, during which participants were able to move around the meeting room and visit the different booths to exchange opinions and extract learnings on compound access in ToxHub, project modeling tools, data visualization and preclinical-clinical predictions.
Day 2 of the meeting offered plenary talks on a variety of topics. A clinical use case session raised interesting discussions among the audience on the so called rosetta stone concept, leveraging the translational nature of the project. Opportunities for collaboration were studied with the neighbouring BigPicture IMI2 project and a progress update was given on the Open Innovation Modelling Challenge and the Virtual Control Groups initiative, which has the potential of reducing the number of animals used in research up to 25%.
The meeting culminated in the 1st eTRANSAFE Awards ceremony. The awards were granted in three categories to partners who had made important contributions to the project. After nominations cast by consortium members, the final awardees were Nicolas Bosc (EMBL-EBI) for Outstanding Individual Academic Contribution, Frank Bringezu (Merck) for Outstanding Individual Industry Contribution and GMV as a group for Outstanding Team Contribution. We send our congratulations to all the winners!
The 15th CM concluded with an overview on project management & sustainability perspectives, followed by recommendations from the project external Scientific Advisory Board, whose members actively participated in the sessions and discussions throughout the meeting.
We thank all the participants for this extremely productive event, and we are very much looking forward to meeting again for the next edition in October!
