CIAO: a living experiment in interdisciplinary large-scale collaboration facilitated by the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework.

Introduction: The CIAO project was launched in Spring 2020 to address the need to make sense of the numerous and disparate data available on COVID-19 pathogenesis. Based on a crowdsourcing model of large-scale collaboration, the project has exploited the Adverse Outcome Pathway (AOP) knowledge management framework built to support chemical risk assessment driven by mechanistic understanding of the biological perturbations at the different organizational levels. Hence the AOPs might have real potential to integrate data produced through different approaches and from different disciplines as experienced in the context of COVID-19. In this study, we aim to address the effectiveness of the AOP framework (i) in supporting an Methods: We used a survey disseminated among the CIAO participants, a workshop open to all interested CIAO contributors, a series of interviews with some participants and a self-reflection on the processes. Results: The project has supported genuine Discussion: Extrapolate the successful CIAO approach and related processes to other areas of science where the AOP could foster interdisciplinary and systematic organization of the knowledge is an exciting perspective.