science

OpenPHACTS

OpenPHACTS is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand OpenPHACTS rather than just read about it. In short: Open PHACTS (Open Pharmacological Concept Triple Store) was a European initiative public–private partnership between academia, publishers, enterprises, pharmaceutical companies and other organisations working to enable better, cheaper and faster drug discovery. It has been funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, selected as part of three projects to "design methods for common standards and sharing of data for…

Key takeaways

OpenPHACTS belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect OpenPHACTS to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of OpenPHACTS from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Open PHACTS (Open Pharmacological Concept Triple Store) was a European initiative public–private partnership between academia, publishers, enterprises, pharmaceutical companies and other organisations working to enable better, cheaper and faster drug discovery. It has been funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, selected as part of three projects to "design methods for common standards and sharing of data for more efficient drug development and patient treatment in the future".

Partnerships A total of 27 partners were involved including:

Academia: Maastricht University, University of Santiago de Compostela, University of Vienna, University of Manchester, University of Bonn, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, European Bioinformatics Institute, Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, Technical University of Denmark, University of Hamburg Pharmaceutical companies: Pfizer, Merck KGaA, Eli Lilly and Company, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca Other companies: ChemSpider, Biovia, Eagle Genomics, Entagen Publishers: Royal Society of Chemistry, Thomson Reuters

Drug discovery The Open Pharmacological Space created by the consortium intended to support open innovation and in-house non-public drug discovery research by removing bottlenecks in drug development. Resources from the project are publicly available on GitHub. To reduce the barriers to drug discovery in industry, academia and for small businesses, the Open PHACTS consortium built the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform. This platform was freely available, integrating pharmacological data from a variety of information resources and providing tools and services to question this integrated data to support pharmacological research.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with OpenPHACTS

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what OpenPHACTS claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to OpenPHACTS before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about OpenPHACTS ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of OpenPHACTS

In research: OpenPHACTS appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses OpenPHACTS in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: OpenPHACTS is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Drug discovery, Information technology organizations based in Europe, Medical databases, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for OpenPHACTS outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study OpenPHACTS in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what OpenPHACTS means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain OpenPHACTS out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is OpenPHACTS in simple terms?

Why does OpenPHACTS matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study OpenPHACTS?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on OpenPHACTS.