Participants
The ETHCSTWIN consortium comprises of 5 organisations from 4 European Countries, that together form a complete group uniting the necessary expertise, skills, interdisciplinary knowledge, and resources to constitute a representative value chain of actors, capable of achieving the demanding project goals. The consortium partners have been carefully selected to provide complementary skills and competencies, which adequately cover all the project objectives and activities.
This institute mainly consists of pharmacists, chemists, botanists, philologists and paleographers, hence it’s crucial for us to collaborate with experts in Computer Science, Machine Learning and AI mainly for the creation of databases, the use of NLP and text mining methods to retrieve information from published articles, ancient texts and other databases such as botanical, literature, or chemical. A big aim of the Institute will be (through the recording of this valuable information) to select promising medicinal plants for the development of pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and modern phytotherapeutics. We already have in place some rudimentary custom databases regarding the traditional use of plants, chemical compounds and bioactivity, with the aim to merge them all and build one dedicated to the Mediterranean/Balkan flora.
Fraunhofer is the largest applied research organisation for applied research in the EU. The mission of Fraunhofer is to foster innovation by bridging between academic science and industrial application. The Department of Bioinformatics at Fraunhofer Institute for Scientific Computing and Algorithms (SCAI) is doing applied research and development in the field of information extraction and semantic text analysis, knowledge-based modelling of diseases, and biomedical data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). In compliance with the general mission of the Fraunhofer Institute, the Department of Bioinformatics is working closely with industrial partners – including small and medium- sized enterprises– to enhance their competitiveness through mediating knowledge and technology transfer from academic research to industrial applications. Positioned at the boundary between industrial and academic research, Fraunhofer SCAI maintains strong links with both communities.
The proprietary PangeAITM platform of Pangea Botanica comprises data ETL (extract-transform-load) pipelines, custom-made ontologies, and a data mining platform to integrate and analyse information on the prior medicinal use of plants and other life species for drug discovery. Hence, Pangea Botanica will be able to utilize and integrate information from the domain of medicinal plants and their traditional use, as well as associated information, provided by the other project partners to standardize it, and integrate it into a platform for hypothesis generation and applied drug discovery, based on evidence of therapeutic efficacy and safety. Pangea Botanica has a compound from the ethnobotany field going into clinical studies later this year, with excellent evidence of efficacy in animal models. Hence Pangea Botanica provides the ideal platform to apply Computer Science to the area of traditional medicine, to really understand the domain specifics of this area, and to translate the data compiled into successful drug discovery projects.
UNISG focuses mainly on studying sustainable food systems especially in terms of ecologies, perceptions, and human and goods mobility. An important asset of healthy and sovereign food systems is surely represented by local herbal medicines. The expertise UNISG will bring is related to the following fields: fermented foods/folk herbal teas and “food-medicines” / traditional veterinary and fodder plants / cross-cultural and cross-temporal dynamics of plant use/migrants’ and diasporas foods and herbal products. UNISG research group has significant expertise in the ΕΤΗ of the Balkans and would like to pursue the project with three main aims: 1) to create a database of homemade foods (ingredients, products, dishes) considered healthy and medicinal, both using historical and ethnographic data 2) to cross-culturally and cross-temporally compare 1. 3) to provide new insights devoted to the herbal and healthy food market for fostering small scale circular economies based upon approx. 30 neglected plant products.
Their research is committed to documenting the traditional ecological knowledge (ethnobotany) of various countries throughout the Balkans. Their work involves conducting numerous research expeditions to catalogue and understand the cultural significance of how Balkan societies use their unique flora biodiversity. In addition, they are utilizing cutting-edge technologies in Natural Products Chemistry to assess the chemical and genetic diversity of plants, with the goal of unlocking the chemical composition of the Balkan Peninsula flora and highlighting their medicinal, nutritional, and conservation potentials. Through an interdisciplinary approach, they have successfully initiated numerous research projects, both locally and through international collaborations. Their contributions to the field are evident through several articles in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters, and presentations on the Balkans' traditional ecological knowledge at local and international conferences.