An Introduction to the DDMoRe Foundation

General
1

Last year, we were approached by the DDMoRe foundation to gauge the interest of the Stan community to participate in their efforts. From the DDMoRe website:

The DDMoRe Foundation was founded in April 2016 with the aim to maintain and enhance the public domain DDMoRe standards and tools to deliver and improve the quality, efficiency and cost effectiveness of Model-Informed Drug Discovery & Development (MID3) and Therapeutic Use. Its current partners consist of Pharmaceutical Companies and Academic Institutions that drive the strong belief that Model-Informed Drug Discovery and Development will profit from standardisation and integration. By elaborating on principles like model sharing and interoperability based on standards, the foundation will support the community with knowledge and integrated tools to improve efficiency in model building.

I have spoken to some of you about it during StanCon, but I wanted to post it here for broader distribution. During our call last year, DDMoRe representatives outlined the following goals:

  • Initiate a dialogue with the potential to develop a mutually beneficial collaboration
  • Raise level of awareness within Stan of the DDMoRe Foundation
  • Raise level of awareness within Stan of the DDMoRe Foundation thoughts on a mutually beneficial collaboration
  • Gauge level of interest from Stan in DDMoRe Foundation
  • (Ultimately) begin the process of developing a mutually beneficial collaboration

I made it very clear that I do not speak for the Stan community, but I told them that I am happy to be a liaison. I can also make a direct introduction if there is interest.

A couple of immediate questions:

  • Is there any interest in integrating Stan into the DDMoRe ecosystem, which currently includes support for NONMEM, Monolix, Simulix, WinBUGS, and I think a few others)?
  • Would anyone from the Stan team or community be interested in participating or leading this effort?
2

Thanks for the update, Eric.

Who uses it and how much effort would it be to integrate and then maintain going forward?

I usually don’t get anything out of these big ecosystem/integration efforts (which are very popular for both cross-country EU grants and bakeoff-based DARPA grants) because they tend to make easy things easier at the expense of making hard things harder (usually by making you custom build a bunch of their interface components to get to the functionality in some underlying system). But then I’m also an outlier user of these things.

3

Thanks for weighing in, Bob.
We are trying to figure out the answers to these questions; some of the preliminary information is contained in this presentation.

4

Thanks, @ericnovik and @Bob_Carpenter. I’ll try to get a handle of scope of how this would interact with Stan. I’ll report back with any more information.