Crowdsourcing for Health Project

The Wellcome Trust Seed Funded project, ‘Crowdsourcing for Health’, came to an end in June 2017. The project saw Annamaria Carusi and collaborators becoming increasingly immersed in social media platforms for gathering and sharing knowledge among scientists, regulators, and patients. The Adverse Outcome Pathway community, which has the broad aim of shifting chemical safety testing from animal based studies, to mechanistic predictive models, use social media as a key element in the success of this effort. Working closely with the community, Annamaria was invited to co-lead a workgroup on expanding awareness and uptake of the AOP framework at the prestigious Pellston Workshop dedicated to the AOP framework in March 2017; she has also taken a lead role in developing a Roadmap for the successful development of this approach, that hopefully, will lead to fewer animal experiments and better health for humans … and other animals. This has now been published in the Journal of Science in the Total Environment, under the title ‘Harvesting the Promise of AOPs: An Assessment and Recommendations’, and is an excellent example of cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaboration, including a highly active humanities and social science component, alongside team members in science, governance, regulation, and industry.