The project is a consortium of the University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest, PRIM-A-VET and E-Group, supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH), and will be implemented over the next 3 years. On the part of the University, the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and DFI are participating in the project. E-Group will provide technological and data infrastructure expertise, including some data engineering and data science tasks.

The animal health repository platform will be able to integrate animal health, veterinary public health, food safety and human health data from different sources and perform complex analyses on them. The platform will allow the identification of multiple candidate agents to combat veterinary antibiotic resistance.

The essence of drug repositioning (also known as drug repurposing) is to use an already authorised medicine for a different purpose than its original medical implication. The drug discovered in this way can be produced more quickly, with lower costs and with less risk than developing an entirely new drug starting with a new chemical entity.

One of the main objectives of DFI is to create a key element of the project, a date lake. A data lake is a central storage repository that holds big data, usually in structured and unstructured format as well. Another important task of DFI will be the review of several approved drugs and feed supplements that have synergistic effects with antibiotics or inhibit the development of antibiotic resistance.  

The developed big data repository can be used for the generation of repository drug candidates within the project, but due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the integrated data, in the long term, it will be suitable for many other purposes and for a wide range of users in animal health, veterinary public health and food chain safety related analyses and research, thus fitting into the One Health concept.

Although platforms are available that identify drug candidates for certain indications on the basis of similarities (e.g. chemical structure), we do not know of any complex system integrating several complex data sources, neither in Hungary nor internationally.