EATRIS, within Work Package 1 of EOSC-Life, has published MICHA in Briefings in Bioinformatics!
Chemosensitivity assays are commonly used for preclinical drug discovery and clinical trial optimization. However, data from independent assays are often discordant, largely attributed to uncharacterized variation in the experimental materials and protocols.
That is where MICHA (Minimal information for Chemosensitivity Assays) comes in. MICHA is a pipeline to enable the FAIRification of drug screening experiments.
Existing efforts often lack support from data integration tools. MICHA, on the other hand, can automatically extract publicly available information to facilitate the assay annotation including compounds, samples, reagents and data processing methods. It provides an integrative web server and database to obtain compound annotation including chemical structures, targets and disease indications.
In addition, MICHA eases the annotation of cell line/patient samples, assay protocols and literature references by retrieving manually curated catalogues, and exports a report that conforms to the FAIR principle of drug screening studies.
FAIRified protocols from 5 major cancer drug screening studies as well as 6 recently conducted COVID-19 studies consolidate the utility of MICHA. This dataset is available at: https://micha-protocol.org/protocols/index.
We think this freely available tool will be very helpful to our community and encourage you to spread the word far and wide.
We would also very much appreciate your contribution with new data sets that could be implemented in MICHA to make it more robust and comprehensive: please get in touch with Zia ur Rehman.
