Understanding how compounds affect the disease biology of patients, and which potential side effects could be expected, is one of the core challenges in drug discovery. Transcriptomics (RNA-seq) allows us to measure these compound effects via an unbiased readout of gene expression changes. While „conventional“ analysis of RNA-seq data yields insights into individual compound effects and similarities, deeper connections between principles of compound structure and transcriptome effect elude us. Insights into this connection would help us support project teams with data-driven decision making on compounds. In this pilot, we are bringing together a cross-functional team of colleagues from LST, CMD, SyMOL and DS&AI to tackle this challenge and build a toolkit to enable understanding of how compound structure relates to complex gene expression patterns and to explore common themes amongst structures or shared off-target/general perturbation effects. This toolbox will become the starting point for other efforts aimed at leveraging multi-omics data in understanding compound mechanism of actions. Artwork created using Stable Diffusion.
The SCLM4Future project together with the PRINCE (Preclinical Information Center) project as well as the CONDAS (Connecting Data for Science) team is an excellent example for a successful cross-functional collaboration between CD&O, RED preMed and DS&AI within Research & Development but also between Platform IT and external partners. Together the team achieved to overcome legacy manual processes, redundant maintenance work, and functional silos by introducing new digital solutions and concepts with a strong collaborative mindset. The newly released SCLM 2.0 (Standard Codelist Maintenance) & PTO (Preclinical Terminology and Ontology) systems will enable our organization to improve the quality of controlled terminologies with regards to standard codelists and codes while reducing maintenance time and effort. This will have a positive impact on the code/codelist consistency across clinical and preclinical, as well as the compliance to regulatory requirements (e.g. CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standard Consortium) Controlled Terminology). The approach to share our knowledge as well as our efforts across functions will be an important step to archive our goals to increase data quality, interoperability and reusability – or to make a long story short: to make our data even more FAIR. For more information contact: Daniela Bergann.
