Interoperable Approach to Collaborative Drug Design and Predictive Toxicology

In this presentation I discuss the critical role of interoperability in collaboration situations in drug design and predictive toxicology. I reflect on the inspiration of the Tamboti Tree Use Case from our recent conservation work trip to South Africa. The role of intereroperability and ontology development in the OpenTox predictive toxicology framework is discussed.  The evolution of development and prototyping within OpenTox has demonstrated its potential as a Semantic Web for Predictive Toxicology, alternative testing methods and risk assessment. Several recent OpenTox interoperations have been achieved including with Bioclipse, CDK, ToxCast, and Leadscope. OpenTox will provide a valuable open standards based foundation on which to create services and link resources for the new ToxBank infrastructure project.

I provide an overview of the approach used in the FP7 Synergy project where we have established a Scientists Against Malaria virtual organisation which is carrying out a number of modelling and experimental drug design activities against a kinase target in Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria. We use an ontological approach to interoperate between a collaborative electronic notebook, Synergy collaboration services and event-driven recommendation rules for consensus formation and traffic light discussion and decision making on conflicting predictions or experimental results.

The presentation is available from:

http://www.opentox.org/home/documents/presentations/hardyiqpcpresentationfeb2011/view