The D4Science community within the health sciences is a collaborative network that brings together three key areas: bioinformatics and genetics, personalised medicine, and epidemiology. This convergence fosters innovation and discovery by leveraging the strengths of each field. Researchers involved in initiatives like the I-Gene project explore genetic diversity and its effects on health and conservation. In contrast, the Navigator project aims to advance personalised medicine by applying genetic information to tailor healthcare to individual patients. Furthermore, the SerGenCovid initiative addresses global health crises by investigating immune responses to COVID-19, thereby enhancing our knowledge of viral transmission and public health interventions. These communities are united by the goal of leveraging D4Science's platform for data sharing, computation, and interdisciplinary collaboration to foster groundbreaking advancements in health and science.
The health science community encounters significant challenges, particularly when handling sensitive patient data and navigating the complexities of large-scale omics data.
Researchers must ensure patient privacy and data security, while also fostering open data sharing to accelerate research. The sheer volume and complexity of genomic, proteomic, and other biological datasets require sophisticated analytical methods and high-performance computing infrastructure.
Additionally, integrating data from disparate sources, such as clinical records, imaging data, and environmental factors, poses interoperability challenges.
The community also faces the need for reproducible research practices, ensuring that scientific findings are transparent, verifiable, and can be built upon by other researchers.
Addressing these issues requires robust data governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and technological solutions for data integration and advanced analytics. The ethical dimension of data science is a key topic, considering how to preserve personal information and privacy.
D4Science provides several key advantages to the health science community.
The platform offers Virtual Research Environments (VREs) that can be customised to meet the specific needs of different research projects, providing access to tailored tools, applications, and datasets.
The Cloud Computing Platform (CCP) supports computationally intensive analyses and the integration of analytical methods and workflows. Interactive environments like JupyterLab and RStudio enable data exploration, coding, and visualisation, enhancing the analytical process.
D4Science facilitates data integration from various sources, breaking down data silos and creating a comprehensive view of research information.
The Data Publishing Framework supports the sharing of research results while promoting the principles of open science and the StorageHub ensures secure data storage and access policies control.
Gateway
I-GENE Gateway
The I-GENE (In-vivo Gene Editing by NanotransducErs) project pushes the boundaries of efficient and reliable ways to make precise, targeted changes to the genome of living cells that is the long-standing and main goal of gene therapy and biomedical researchers. The I-GENE Gateway and its VREs are a ready to use web-based working environments specifically conceived to provide the I-GENE worldwide community with the needed facilities (services, data, capacity), in line with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable) principles.
NAVIGATOR Gateway
NAVIGATOR project aims to boost 4P precision medicine in oncology by advancing translational research based on quantitative imaging and multi-omics analyses, towards a better understanding of cancer biology, cancer care, and, more generally, cancer risk. The project will deliver a technological solution relying on: an open imaging Biobank, collecting and preserving large amount of quality, standardised imaging data and related omics data in a secure and privacy-preserving model.
SerGenCovid19 Gateway
Il CNR, il maggiore ente di ricerca italiano, ha deciso di realizzare lo studio SerGenCovid-19, una raccolta di dati clinici, sieri e materiale genetico su larga scala nella popolazione italiana, che si propone di conoscere meglio la risposta individuale al virus, cos� che si possano sviluppare protocolli mirati per la gestione dei pazienti affetti da Covid-19.