Launch of the RECeSS project website!

We are pleased to launch the blog associated with the Robust Explainable Controllable Standard for drug Screening (RECeSS) project!

The RECeSS project is a two-year-long €190k research project funded by an European Union’s prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship 2022 (Project ID: 101102016) starting from May 2023. This project focuses on the development of new, improved techniques for drug development.

Indeed, in 2021, drug development pipelines still lasted 10 years in average, and cost around $2 billion, while facing high failure rates, as only around 10% of Phase 0 drug candidates reached the commercialization stage (source). These issues can be mitigated through drug repurposing, where existent compounds are systematically screened for new therapeutic indications. Collaborative filtering is a semi-supervised learning framework that leverages known drug-disease matchings to make novel recommendations. However, prior works cannot be leveraged because of their lack of focus on human oversight and robustness to biological data.

In the short term, the RECeSS project would yield the first method that fully integrates biological interpretation and risk assessment to collaborative filtering-based repurposing. Long-term outcomes might help define sustainable and transparent drug development for rare diseases.

Research leads will be investigated by the postdoctoral fellow Dr. Clémence Réda. The project is primarily supervised by Pr. Olaf Wolkenhauer, at SBI Rostock (Universität Rostock), in collaboration with Dr. Jill-Jênn Vie, in the Soda team (Inria Saclay).

This blog aims at reporting progress on the research project –for instance, by providing results from benchmarks on known drug-repurposing datasets– and at popularizing the topics covered by this project (collaborative filtering, drug repurposing, etc.).

Stay tuned!