Mission & Research lines

This group led by Laura I. Furlong and Ferran Sanz, promotes and tackles synergistic and integrative strategies for affording biomedical problems, making use of approaches developed within the IBI group but also fostering the collaboration between research groups of the GRIB. The current research lines of the Integrative Biomedical Informatics group are:

• Development of new strategies and tools for knowledge extraction and linkage from biomedical literature and other publicly available sources.
• Network biology for the study of human diseases and drug toxicity
• Integrative knowledge management and exploitation in drug discovery and development, including multi-level and multi-scale modelling and simulation.

The group is currently coordinating two large scale scientific initiatives:

• The IMI project eTOX that integrates bioinformatics and chemoinformatics approaches for the development of expert systems allowing the in silico prediction of drug toxicity.
• The FP7 coordination and support action INBIOMEDvision that promotes biomedical informatics by means of the permanent monitoring of the scientific state-of-the-art and existing activities in the theme, prospective analysis of the emerging challenges and opportunities, and dissemination of the knowledge in the field.

The group participates in many other EU-funded projects, like the ongoing IMI project Open PHACTS which aim is to develop an open access innovation platform, called Open Pharmacological Space (OPS), via a semantic web approach; the recently granted IMI project EMIF, dealing with the creation and exploitation of a European Medical Informatics Framework, as well as the currently active Virtual Physiological Human network of excellence (VPH NoE). Other examples of recent European projects in which the group has participated are EU-ADR, @neurIST and CancerGRID.