IMI CARE case study: Quick-response COVID-19 effort opens FAIR data on ~5,500 compounds

The IMI CARE project was initiated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic with the goal of delivering treatments for COVID-19 and future coronavirus outbreaks. CARE not only focuses on delivering novel drugs designed specifically to treat COVID-19 and other coronaviruses but also on ‘repurposing’ approved drugs and drug candidates that were originally developed for other diseases that could potentially treat COVID-19.

Making CARE data public can help other drug repurposing studies. The CARE project is sharing its scientific results through open-access platforms and peer-reviewed journals, as well as via relevant conferences and other events.

In the context of the CARE project, Janssen Pharmaceutica published a dataset in the public domain describing the results of ~5,500 FDA-approved drugs and clinical candidates that have passed Phase I studies which were screened for anti-SARS-CoV-2 activity.

A pre-FAIRification assessment by the FAIRplus squad team highlighted several features that could be modified to increase the dataset’s initial FAIRness level of 37%. Especially findability appeared to be a factor to be improved. To increase findability, the FAIRplus squad recommended uploading the data to ChEMBL, a publicly accessible repository specifically for bioactive compounds.

The procedure on how to publish bioactivity data on ChEMBL will be added to the FAIR Cookbook recipes for future reuse. Using this set of standards resulted in a post-FAIRification assessment7 of 92,50%.

Read/download/share the CARE case study, openly available on Zenodo