CIAO: a living experiment in interdisciplinary large-scale collaboration facilitated by the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework.

The CIAO project was launched in Spring 2020 to address the need to make sense of the numerous and disparate data available on COVID-19 pathogenesis. Based on a crowdsourcing model of large-scale collaboration, the project has exploited the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP), a knowledge management framework built to support chemical risk assessment driven by mechanistic understanding of the biological perturbations at the different organisational levels. In this study, we aim to address how effective was the AOP framework (i) in supporting an interdisciplinary collaboration for a viral disease and (ii) in working as the conceptual mediator of a crowdsourcing model of collaboration. As methods, we used a survey disseminated among the CIAO participants, a workshop open to all interested CIAO contributors, a series of interviews with some participants and a self-reflection on the processes. Results showed that the framework provided a common reference point for discussion and collaboration, that the diagrams used in the AOPs assist with making explicit what are the different perspectives brought to the knowledge about the pathways and that the Wiki showed up many aspects about its usability for those not already in the world of AOPs. Extrapolate the successful CIAO approach and related processes to other areas of science where the AOP framework could foster interdisciplinary organisation of knowledge is an exciting perspective.

CARUSI Annamaria;  FILIPOVSKA Julija;  WITTWEHR Clemens;  CLERBAUX Laure-Alix; 

2024-06-14

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA

JRC133420

2296-2565 (online),   

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212544/full,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC133420,   

10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212544 (online),