New Open PHACTS Foundation members steer future direction

The not-for-profit Open PHACTS Foundation has announced its first three members – GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen and Roche. These new members will steer the future of the successor organisation to the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)- funded Open PHACTS project.

The Open PHACTS community includes academia, industry, application developers and semantic web experts and has already delivered a cloud-based data platform that is said to demonstrate the effectiveness of robust data integration in answering real scientific questions. The Open PHACTS Discovery Platform offers free access to its suite of APIs which connect biology, chemistry and disease information from public datasets.

The commitment by the three global pharmaceutical industry members is said to signify a major step in ensuring the sustainability of infrastructure developed during the Open PHACTS project.

'The unrivalled triumph of Open PHACTS and the data integration infrastructure developed by the project highlights the benefits of effective scientific community collaboration. The engagement that the Foundation has seen from pharmaceutical companies is testimony to the value of the project,' said Gerhard Ecker of the University of Vienna, Austria.