The Challenge

Current treatments for Tuberculosis (TB) are complex, long term and often decades old. Although curable, TB still causes over a million deaths every year. New drugs are urgently needed as TB threatens to spiral out of control as the Tuberculosis bacteria evolve to resist current treatments. But new therapies face challenges in the need to provide combination therapies with potentially one or more of dozens of other therapeutic agents. The array of possible combinations that need to be investigated makes this a high risk area for investigation. PReDICT-TB aims to ease the burden by looking at ways to identify the most potent combinations of new and existing agents by bringing together existing knowledge on treatments and projecting pre-clinical data into the clinical setting. But managing combinations brings an exponential increase in the complexity of the analysis challenges.

The eTRIKS solution

Harmonising data models for pre-clinical and clinical data to compare different drug regimens from different organisation is a challenge to any standards group. eTRIKS has worked with the PReDICT-TB scientists to help them build a model of their data that allows them to compare confidently across different studies. At the same time we have created an Application Programming Interface (API) for tranSMART that allows the scientists to combine the user friendly cohort selection features in tranSMART with the analytical power of R to combine clinical and pre-clinical data sets in novel non-linear analysis models.

The Detail

• Requirements for data management analysed and reported
• Data model developed and refined to meet the evolving needs of the project
• Novel analysis method developed to compare clinical and preclinical data in R
• User training

Learn more about PReDICT-TB