CDD's Q2 Scientific Webinar, had our expert panel of scientists, Dr. Ellen Berg (Eurofins and Alto Predict) and Dr. Isabella Feierberg (AstraZeneca) discuss the importance of metadata and their vision for how assay annotation will shape the future of drug discovery.
One of the most important assets in science is data, but how valuable is that data if we don't understand the metadata behind it? A point on a graph, a static image of a cell, or a readout from an instrument mean nothing without the experimental details that characterize them.
Today, accurate metadata capture is being recognized as a means to increase reproducibility and productivity across the scientific community. Initiatives like GO FAIR seek to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable and are increasing in popularity.
Metadata can greatly augment scientific data. In practice, we must ensure that metadata capture does not become a burden to the scientist.
Ellen L. Berg, Ph.D. is an entrepreneur and scientific leader in drug discovery technology innovation.
She is Chief Scientific Officer, Translational Biology for Eurofins Discovery and a principal at Alto Predict LLC. Dr. Berg was the lead inventor of the BioMAP® platform of human primary cell-based disease models, now successfully commercialized by Eurofins and serving the pharmaceutical and consumer products industries to deliver safer and more effective products.
In previous positions, Dr. Berg was co-founder and CSO of BioSeek, Inc. and led a research team at Protein Design Labs, Inc.
She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, where she was a fellow of the American Cancer Society and a Special Fellow of the Leukemia Society of America.
She is currently focused on working with industry, academic, and government stakeholders to incorporate non-animal, human-based in vitro and in silico predictive models into the drug discovery process and helping to promote the adoption of these platforms by regulatory agencies.
Dr. Berg holds several patents in the field of inflammation, and has authored over 80 publications.
Isabella Feierberg, Ph.D. has over 15 years of experience as a computational chemist in drug discovery.
After her Ph.D. in computational studies of biomolecular structure-function relationships at Uppsala University in Sweden, she joined AstraZeneca where she supports the early drug discovery pipeline.
Her research ranges from individual drug discovery projects to method development for High Throughput Screening analysis, assay informatics, pre-competitive collaborations, and FAIR data.
Being an end-user of experimental data for analysis, modeling and decision making, she relies heavily on high-quality data and metadata.
Dr. Feierberg is currently involved with the Pistoia Alliance to plan a pre-competitive collaboration on high-quality curation and FAIRification of public domain assay protocols with public ontologies