MICHA, developed by EATRIS partners, published in Briefings in Bioinformatics

Published 13 September 2021

MICHA – Minimal information for Chemosensitivity Assays, is a pipeline to enable the FAIRification of drug screening experiments developed by EATRIS partners in the scope of EOSC-Life WP1. Read the publication here.

Chemosensitivity assays are commonly used for preclinical drug discovery and clinical trial optimisation. However, data from independent assays are often discordant, largely attributed to uncharacterised variation in the experimental materials and protocols.

Contrarily to existing efforts that are often lacking support from data integration tools, MICHA:

  • can automatically extract publicly available information to facilitate the assay annotation including compounds, samples, reagents and data processing methods.
  • provides an integrative web server and database to obtain compound annotation including chemical structures, targets and disease indications.
  • eases the annotation of cell line/patient samples, assay protocols and literature references by retrieving manually curated catalogues.
  • exports a report that conforms to the FAIR principle of drug screening studies.

To consolidate the utility of MICHA, it provides FAIRified protocols from five major cancer drug screening studies as well as six recently conducted COVID-19 studies. This dataset is available at: https://micha-protocol.org/protocols/index. With the MICHA web server and database, we envisage a wider adoption of a community-driven effort to improve the open-access of drug sensitivity assays.

We think this freely available tool will be very helpful to our community and encourage you to spread the word far and wide.