How to Catalyze a Collaboration

In April 2020, while the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, a chance exchange of Twitter messages between JRC staff and scientists of other research organizations led to the instigation of a JRC Exploratory Research project titled "Modelling the pathogenesis of COVID-19 using the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework" (CIAO). Over the following months, the core JRC team managed to attract more than 70 collaborators from renowned international research and government organizations, and ultimately (April 2023) published 11 papers and uploaded 14 Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs) to the central OECD website. This paper describes not only the scientific elements of the undertaking, but also highlights the social aspects that led to its success: By re-purposing the OECD AOP framework, a knowledge management paradigm already well-established in toxicology, and innovatively applying it to a viral disease, the CIAO project team managed to assemble a truly cross-disciplinary body of knowledge and explain the COVID-19 disease process in a holistic way. The 70+ team members came from science domains which under normal circumstances would never have interacted, and CIAO showed how such collaboration can best be encouraged and maintained. In addition, the CIAO project highlighted areas for improvement in the AOP framework itself and thereby influenced the way AOPs are now managed, including in its original toxicology domain.

CARUSI Annamaria;  CLERBAUX Laure-Alix;  WITTWEHR Clemens; 

2023-09-13

NATL ACAD SCIENCES

JRC133424

0748-5492 (online),   

https://issues.org/catalyze-collaboration-aop-framework-carusi-clerbaux-wittwehr/,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC133424,   

10.58875/WXQO5887 (online),