2 March 2021
The extraordinary proliferation of scientific research prompted by the global pandemic has brought the need for advanced systems for organizing scientific information into focus. To address this pressing need, Humane Society International joined the innovative crowd-sourcing CIAO project (“Modelling the Pathogenesis of COVID-19 using the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework”), working in cooperation with the European Joint Research Center, the Karolinska Institute and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
COVID-19 has proven to be a great challenge for medicine, especially with respect to the urgency of efforts to understand its underlying biological processes and the complex range of patient outcomes dependent on so many external factors.
CIAO is a global effort to systematize the wealth of knowledge now accumulating on SARS-CoV-2, give it structure, meaning and accessibility, and maximize its utility to researchers and clinicians worldwide, enabling stakeholders to avoid duplication of research and accelerate progress to develop treatments and vaccines.
In 2020 alone, scientific efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in tens of thousands of papers published. This deluge of information has to some extent overwhelmed researchers, effectively hampering their ability to sift through results, retrieve critical and valuable information, and integrate their findings into a coherent, intelligible and broader structure. [Read more…]