The team led by IRB Barcelona's David Rossell and Patrick Aloy and by Anaxomics Biotech achieved fourth place worldwide in the competition for diagnosing and classifying patients in a blind test for four diseases, the first challenge posed by IMPROVER project. Backed by the scientific community, IBM Research and Philip Morris International (PMI) R&D launched a project called IMPROVER (Industrial Methodology for PROcess VErification in Research) in May with the aim of challenging the world's best computational researchers to demonstrate the power of their methods to exploit genomic information to extract predictive and clinical indicators that are reliable and verifiable.

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The biosciences are generating enormous amounts of data at unprecedented speeds. Making sense of these data and extracting useful and reliable information from databases is an increasingly difficult and complex task. The first IMPROVER challenge has highlighted the predictive power of biocomputation given that the majority of participants were able to diagnose patients with at least 90% certainty, and in some cases 100%.

The first challenge posed by IMPROVER, “Diagnosis Signature”, consisted of using computational methods to evaluate and verify samples from patients with psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, chronic pulmonary obstruction and lung cancer, in so-called “blind tests”.

According to David Rossell, head of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Unit at IRB Barcelona who designed the probability prediction algorithms, “this type of international challenge is very effective as a proof of concept, to demonstrate that it is possible to make predictions and to make them well, when the world’s most advanced and effective techniques are used.”

Patrick Aloy, Group Leader at the join IRB Barcelona-BSC programme in computational biology, who specializes in molecular networks in disease added: “This competition fosters the creation of a scientific body of evidence for the biomedical community, including both researchers and clinicians, that adds value to and instills confidence in biocomputational techniques and their industrial applications.

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