Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI

Scientific Cooperation Partners

Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI, Sankt Augustin
Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS, Sankt Augustin
Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME, Hamburg
ZB MED – Informationszentrum Lebenswissenschaften, Köln
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) at Université du Luxembourg

Stage 1:

Fraunhofer and ZBMED start a collaboration

The Fraunhofer institutes SCAI, IAIS and IME were contributing to the Pharmacome approach. They did not plan to enter the virology arena. However, when COVID-19 struck, Professor Juliane Fluck from the German Information Center for Life Sciences (ZBMED) in Cologne called us. Together, we started to build workflows for information extraction dedicated to SARS-CoV-2 biology and pathophysiology. A major focus was also on the identification of chemical compounds and candidate drugs for re-purposing approaches.

Stage 2:

Financial support for cooperation between Fraunhofer IME and SCAI

Our partner Fraunhofer IME is involved in Exscalate4CoV, an EU-funded project aimed at identifying candidate drugs for drug-repurposing that may be used to treat COVID-19. Fraunhofer IME had a real interest in the chemical text mining expertise at SCAI, as they observe a tsunami of publications reporting on potential drug repurposing candidates and we all need to cope with that flood.

The Fraunhofer Headquarters in Munich suggested that we make use of our experience in pharmacome building and apply our know-how for the fight against SARS-CoV-2.

Our Fraunhofer-internal activities are now supported with dedicated funding.

Stage 3:

Extended collaboration with international partners

In an attempt at harnessing the power and capacities in automated information extraction (text mining; extraction from tables; extraction from images) across the EU, we were further supported by Fraunhofer Headquarters to set up an international collaboration with leading groups in Europe in the field of text mining. We have reached out to our partner in Luxembourg (Dr. Reinhard Schneider, LCSB Luxembourg), who is a widely recognized leader in text mining. Together, we work on improving our information extraction workflows to generate the best disease maps and pharmacomes in the world.