Sometimes doing things right takes a bit of time.
Since we made the decision to open source our grit Scientific Data Management Platform, we've been itching to get the new version ready so that we could offer it to the many people who have fortunately shown interest in it. At the same time, however, the decision to rebuild the solution to be offered as open source has also given us the opportunity to take a step back and consider whether there was anything we would do differently.
And there was. Over the past 10 years of working with small and large pharma organisations and academic institutions, we have learned a lot, and the decision to change our product gave us an opportunity to put those learnings into practice.
FAIR expertise in action
Working closely with Fraunhofer ITMP in Hamburg on the IMI AMR projects COMBINE and GNA NOW as well as supporting the other AMR Accelerator projects has helped us understand how our platform best supports FAIR data.
Fraunhofer is internationally recognised for their expertise in FAIR, and we have learned a lot about how we can optimise searches based on complex metadata to make specific data views more findable.
In the IHI VICT3R project, we handle SEND data and have built a data model that can handle the search of very large amounts of data, and here too we have learned valuable lessons that we have been able to use to optimise grit.
Therefore, the open source version of grit is not “just” an opened version of our “old” data warehouse but is launched with a new, fully refactored Rails 7 based, moduralised backend and a completely new assay data model.
Launching in May
Of course, it has taken longer to do it this way, but we are convinced that this is the right way to do it so that we can offer as strong a platform as possible when we launch.
We are currently working on finalising our new assay data model, writing great documentation, and testing the platform in collaboration with Fraunhofer, who has been given access to a pre-release of the platform including the compound registration module.
When the assays module is all done, we will dive right into our SAR/project module. This uses the data from the assays, so since the assays data model has been reworked, this also takes more work than a "refactoring". However, we expect to add the SAR/project module to the docker and have it ready for open source use by June.
We plan to launch the open source version of the grit Scientific Data Management Platform on May 5th - provided we feel ready for it. If you want to be notified when the open source version is ready for download, you can sign up here: