The Pistoia Alliance is an initiative to provide an open foundation of data standards, ontologies and services to streamline the Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery workflow (Chemistry, Biological Screening, Logistics) through common business terms, relationships and processes. Its primary vision is to streamline non-competitive elements of the life science workflow by the specification of common standards. Pistoia consists of a number of complementary working groups that focus on relevant technical standards that are published in response to requirements elicited from (i) Software and Service Providers, (ii) Pharma/Biotech/Agro industries, as well as (iii) from non-profit research strictures.

The Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) is Europe's largest public-private initiative aiming to speed up the development of better and safer medicines for patients. IMI supports collaborative research projects and builds networks of industrial and academic experts in order to boost pharmaceutical innovation in Europe. IMI is a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA. A key objective for the IMI is the creation of a communal infrastructure for model based-drug development (MBDD) as the basis for informed, quantitative decision-making. In particular, the aim is to facilitate modelling and simulation (M&S) through the continuous integration of available information related to a drug or disease. The goal is to support mathematical modelling to address drug-related questions researchers, regulators, and public health care bodies face when bringing drugs to patients. The IMI seeks to overcome obstacles to the full adoption of MBDD, and in particular the lack of common tools, languages and ontologies for M&S, which often leads to inefficient reuse of data and duplication of effort by academic, industrial and regulatory stakeholders.

The COmputational Modeling in BIology NEtwork (COMBINE) is an initiative to coordinate the development of the various community standards and formats, initially in Systems Biology and related fields. By doing so, the federated projects will develop a set of interoperable and non-overlapping standards covering all the aspects of computational modelling, at every scale, in every field of biology, in a similar way as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops standards for the Web. COMBINE will organise common meetings, will design common Standard Operating Procedures and provide support for development and implementation of the technical specifications. COMBINE will present a unique voice to interact with funders, other standardisation bodies, corporate stakeholders and end users.

The Virtual Physiological Human aims to apply biomedical research outputs into clinical practice and healthcare industries. In particular, this community fosters the integration of clinical data and models for research purposes in an effort to gain a systemic understanding of pathophysiology. The VPH aims to achieve this goal by formalizing guidelines, standards and protocols to promote translation of basic science and integrative models into healthcare benefits. The impact of this work is to facilitate the use of computational models, software tools and semantic services for clinical predictions through quantitative models that integrate physical processes across spatial scales down to the molecular level.