On September 9th 2015 the Horizon2020 e-Infrastructure project PhenoMenal was launched, a project to create an e-infrastructure to analyse metabolomic data from clinical and population studies.
The project is led by EMBL-EBI, involving 13 international partners, including DTL partner Leiden University. PhenoMeNal is funded with €8 million from the EU’s Horizon2020 programme to bring state-of-the art methods for understanding the molecular drivers of health, healthy ageing and disease into the clinic.
A large number of European citizens are expected to have their genomes sequenced and added to their medical records over the next decade, but to truly comprehend the totality of environmental and genetic factors on a person’s health – in a measurable way – is crucial for personalized medicine. Linking genotype and metabolome data with other factors influencing a patient’s health captures a surprising amount of this highly dynamic information, at relatively low cost. But the data generated is so incredibly vast that the current infrastructure cannot cope on anything close to European scale.
That’s were PhenoMeNal comes into play. The main goal of the project is to develop and deploy the PhenoMeNal Gateway: an e-infrastructure that will make it possible to analyse large-scale metabolomic and genomic data, improving our ability to detect, treat and manage disease. The data will adhere to the FAIR data concept that all data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
The project is closely linked with ELIXIR, which is underpinned with ELIXIR-NL’s Head of Node Barend Mons’ participation in the Scientific Advisory Board of PhenoMeNal.