The challenge of accurately characterizing bioassays is a real pain point for many drug discovery organizations. Research has shown that some organizations have legacy assay collections exceeding 20,000 protocols, the great majority of which are not accurately characterized. This problem is compounded by the fact that many new protocol registrations are still not following FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) Data principles. BioAssay Express is a tool focused on transforming the traditional protocol description from an unstructured free form text into a well-curated data store based upon FAIR Data principles. By using well-defined annotations for assays, the tool enables precise ontology based searches without having to resort to imprecise keyword searches. This talk explores a number of new important features designed to help scientists accelerate the drug discovery process. Some example use-cases include: enabling drug repositioning projects; improving SAR models; identifying appropriate machine learning data sets; fine-tuning integrative-omic pathways; An aspirational goal for our team is to build a metadata schema based on semantic web vocabularies that is comprehensive to the extent that the text description becomes optional. One of the many possibilities is to take the initial prospective ELN entry for a bioassay protocol and feed it directly to an automated instrument. While there are many challenges involved in creating the ELN-to-robot loop, we will provide some insights into our collaborations with UCSF automation experts. In summary, the ability to quickly and accurately search or analyze bioassay data (public or internal) is a rate limiting problem in drug discovery. We will present the latest developments toward removing this bottleneck.

BioAssay express: Creating and exploiting assay metadata

2019 Fall National Meeting

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.