Mission & Research lines

The huge wealth of biomedical information that is currently available is underused because of the difficulties in seeking, integrating and analyzing the relevant information. There is also a great difficulty for the identification and use of clinically actionable information. The goal of the Integrative Biomedical Informatics (IBI) group, led by Laura I. Furlong and Ferran Sanz, is to develop computational methods and tools to address these challenges, with the aim of better understanding human health and disease and contributing to the design of more effective and safer therapeutic interventions.

This group 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 ongoing research lines of the IBI group are:

• Text mining
• Knowledge management and linked data
• Real World Data (RWD) analytics in health
• Systems biology and network medicine for the study of human diseases and drug toxicity
• Integrative knowledge management and exploitation in drug discovery and development

The group is currently coordinating two large scale scientific initiatives:

• The IMI project eTRANSAFE: Enhancing Translational Safety Assessment through Integrative Knowledge Management, aims to develop an advanced data integration infrastructure together with innovative computational methods to improve the security in drug development process. 
• The H2020 project MedBioinformatics on the translational and clinical application of bioinformatics.

The group is also partner in other EU-funded projects, like the ongoing IMI projects:

• transQST: Translational Quantitative Systems Toxicology, aims to develop novel computational approaches using the best available data from the public and private domains to address the problems of drug safety.
• EMIF: European Medical Information Network,  aims to develop a common information framework of patient-level data that will link up and facilitate access to diverse medical and research data sources, opening up new avenues of research for scientists. 
• iPiE: Intelligence Led Assessment of Pharmaceuticals in the Environment, aiming to develop a predictive framework for the environmental impact of drugs.

And the ongoing H2020 projects:

• EU-ToxRisk, aiming to achieve a paradigm shift in toxicology towards a more efficient and animal-free chemical safety assessment.
• ELIXIR-EXCELERATE, to accelerate the implementation of Europe's life-science data infrastructure.

Other examples of recent european projects participated or coordinated by the IBI group are eTOX, Open PHACTS, INBIOMEDvision, Virtual Physiological Human NOE, EU-ADR, @neurIST and CancerGRID.