DEBBIE · A database of experimental biomaterials and their biological effect
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2020-12-15
- EU contribution
- €170,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
A database of experimental biomaterials and their biological effect
Efficient access to organized biomaterials biocompatibility, performance and safety data is a pressing need shared by researchers, clinicians and policy makers. Like in many other biomedical fields, scientific advance is shared in the form of published peer-reviewed articles, with additional technical data in filed patents. Recent years have seen a dramatic hike in the numbers of scientific publications in the biomaterials domain. In February 2021, the search query ‘biomaterials OR cell scaffolds’ returned over 240k records from PubMed, 350k from Web of Science, 850k from Scopus and 1,000k in Google Scholar. The rapid expansion of the knowledge pool and the heterogeneous nature of the data makes the systematic synthesis of biomaterials knowledge a daunting manual task. This problem has wide implications for society- the absence of structured data impedes the use of computational tools and the development of data-driven implants. It also slows down the process of learning from past failures and complications. Text mining systems offer an attractive method to speed up and facilitate extraction, organization and synthesis of information, making the process more robust and systematic. Project DEBBIE, or The Database of Experimental Biomaterials and their Biological Effect aims to address this fundamental problem. The project’s main objective is the design and automated population of the first, open-access biomaterials database, aiming to facilitate a more efficient access to the large literature in the field, generate a comprehensive map of research activity and findings, and enable evidence-based selection of materials for medical applications. Beyond the development of the database, the project is dedicated to laying the foundation for text mining in the biomaterials domain, through the creation, adaptation and optimization of open source assets and tools.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The advent of material science and manufacturing techniques in the last century has led to the development of thousands of novel biomaterials, with potential to revolutionise health care. However, the vast majority of biomaterial studies do not progress beyond the stages of design and testing, and therefore a substantial amount of scientific data is only available in the form of research publications. To date, there is no database curating the experimental data generated by testing novel biomaterials in vitro and in vivo, representing a loss of a valuable big (experimental) data. In here, we propose an open-access database of experimental tissue scaffolds, indexing design features, cellular and tissue responses, thus creating an exhaustive inventory of experimental scaffolds. Such a dataset would enable scientists to efficiently search and interpret relevant information from past studies across all tissues and models, as well as create computational tools to predict and optimise cell-material interaction. A comprehensive map of research activity and findings should also make it easier to identify areas where data is missing or lacking. A systematic, up-to-date overview of the field will also be a useful tool for science policy making. The novelty of the project lies not only in the concept of curating data from laboratory evaluation of experimental biomaterials (rather than just approved medical implants), but also in attempting to face the methodological challenge of extracting and structuring information from the heterogeneous and vast field of experimental biomaterials. One of the keys of this interdisciplinary project is crowd-sourcing biomaterial scientists, thus engaging their expertise and understanding their needs, in order to create a comprehensive, relevant and useful tool to enhance research in the field.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT POLITECNICA DE CATALUNYA · BARCELONACoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union