NCI wins EU Big Data funding award for pharmaceutical analytics research

April 23, 2019

https://www.techcentral.ie/nci-wins-eu-big-data-funding-award-for-pharma/

"National College of Ireland’s cloud competency centre has secured €1.1 million in funding from CHIST-ERA, for their pharmaceuticaldata analytics and cloud computing project.

Each year, CHIST-ERA calls for research proposals on important topics. In 2017, the brief was ‘Big Data and process modelling for smart industry’.

NCI’s cloud competency centre was successful in attaining funding to realise Smart Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (SPuMoNI). Led by NCI’s Dr Adriana Chis and coordinated by PQE Group in Italy, the project also has partners in Spain and Greece.

Dr Horacio Gonzalez-Velez, head of the Cloud Competency Centre, said: “I’m really proud that the Cloud Competency Centre’s core strengths of cloud computing and data analytics have been recognised with this award.”

SPuMoNI was presented by Dr. Chis and González-Vélez at the CHIST-ERA Projects Seminar as part of the EU Presidency 2019 activities in Bucharest in April.

Data integrity and end-to-end traceability are necessary for those in the pharmaceutical industry to comply with international regulations and guidelines. Huge amounts of data, in numerous formats, are generated by automated manufacturing systems. This data must be vigorously analysed to guarantee quality and compliance.

The NCI project will design data quality assessment models that align with those industry regulations. Analysing data behaviour models over time eventually identifies outliers, picking up on data that breaks the rules. Their
semi-autonomous data quality control decision support system ensures best pharmaceutical manufacturing practice.

Gina Quin, president of NCI, says, “It is always gratifying when hard work and reputation are recognised through a research award. The college benefits not just financially, but from undertaking ground-breaking work in Big Data, which will directly impact on industry.”

CHIST-ERA is a group of funding organisations supporting information and communication sciences and technologies. Selected research projects are supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies programme to reinforce European capabilities in certain topics.

In Ireland it is managed by the Irish Research Council. NCI’s cloud competency centre is a hub for teaching and researching."