Verification Of Systems Biology Research In The Age Of Collaborative Competition

Industrial methodology for process verification in research (Improver) was designed as a methodology to validate industrial research processes related to Systems Biology by decomposing an industrial research workflow into individual components, termed building blocks that can be independently verified. The first challenge (Diagnostic Signature) was designed to determine to what extent transcriptomic data can be used for phenotype prediction and to identify best-performing computational methods. The second challenge (Species Translation) was designed to address the extent to which biological effects of stimulus-induced perturbations in one species translate to those in another species. In the third challenge we will provide the community with network models of molecular events contributing to the onset of early chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). These models of key biological processes include access to underlying scientific literature citations that have been expertly curated to provide mechanistic substantiation for each molecular relationship present in the network model. The scientific community will be encouraged in the review of the relationships between molecular entities and to make improvements on the represented biology covering fundamental processes involved in respiratory disease. Our fourth challenge (Grand Challenge) aims to discover molecular biomarkers for early stage COPD leveraging the learning from the previous challenges.