NCI wins EU Big Data funding award for Pharma

Rising to the challenge laid down by CHIST-ERA: “Big data and process modelling for smart industry”, National College of Ireland’s Cloud Competency Centre has won funding to realise Smart Pharmaceutical Manufacturing (SPuMoNI), coordinated by PQE Group in Italy, with partners also in Spain and Greece. The project is led by NCI’s Dr Adriana Chis.

“I’m really proud that the Cloud Competency Centre’s core strengths of cloud computing and data analytics have been recognised with this award, which is worth €1.1m,” said the head of the Cloud Competency Centre, Dr Horacio González-Vélez.

Doctors Chis and González-Vélez jointly presented SPuMoNI at the CHIST-ERA Projects Seminar, which took place in Bucharest this April as part of the EU Presidency 2019 activities.

Data integrity and end-to-end traceability have become a key point for the pharmaceutical industry, in order to comply with different international regulations and guidelines. Automated manufacturing systems continuously generate massive amounts of data in a variety of formats, which must be dynamically analysed to ensure quality and compliance.

SPuMoNI will design data quality assessment models that account for industry regulations, and analyse data behaviour patterns over time to identify outliers, i.e.; data that violates compliance. This semi-autonomous data quality control decision support system will more efficiently ensure best pharmaceutical manufacturing practice.

“It is always gratifying when hard work and reputation are recognised through a research award. The college benefits not just financially, but from undertaking ground-breaking work in Big Data, which will directly impact on industry,” said the president of National College of Ireland, Gina Quin.

CHIST-ERA is a programme for European Coordinated Research on Long-term Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies, supported by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies programme.

CHIST-ERA’s aim is to coordinate cooperation among national and regional research funding organisations, mainly in Europe, to reinforce transnational collaboration in multidisciplinary research with the potential to lead to significant breakthroughs in ICT-based scientific challenges.

In Ireland, CHIST-ERA is managed by the Irish Research Council. National College of Ireland’s award is one of only two Irish projects funded by CHIST-ERA this year.

The Cloud Competency Centre is a global hub of excellence for teaching and research, forming a unique industry-academy ecosystem at the heart of the school of computing in National College of Ireland.