There surely can’t be anyone in the pharma industry who hasn’t heard the story of thalidomide. The disaster that followed the release onto the market of thalidomide in 1959 triggered a wave of regulatory changes to ensure reliable evidence of drug safety, efficacy and chemical purity, before a new drug is released onto the market. 

While failure of clinical efficacy is the major cause of drug attrition, a poor safety profile is also a major factor in failure of drugs in development, at all stages from initial lead candidate through preclinical and clinical development to post-marketing surveillance. In order to ensure the safety of drugs on the market, rigorous testing is carried out throughout the pipeline, and can be categorised into preclinical safety/toxicology in animal models, clinical safety in human subjects, and then post-market pharmacovigilance, to look for safety signals across a wide patient population (see schematic below).

At every stage, critical data is being both generated and sought from unstructured text – from internal safety report, scientific literature, individual case safety reports, clinical investigator brochures, patient forum, social media, conference abstracts. Intelligent search across these hundreds of thousands of pages can provide the information for key decision support. Many of our customers are using the power of Linguamatics I2E’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution to transform the unstructured text into actionable structured data that can be rapidly visualized and analyzed, at every stage through the safety lifecycle of a drug.

As medicinal chemists strive to fill the pipeline with the best possible novel compounds, they require efficient access to the ever-expanding mass of existing information and knowledge about compounds, targets, and diseases and how they are related. Much of this information is buried in published journal articles, patents, reports, and internal document repositories. Posing chemical compound-, target-, and disease-centered questions to extract and organize the data in order to explore these relationships is laborious, time consuming, and potentially error prone. Locating chemical structural information is especially challenging, when chemicals in the literature are described by many different names: technical, trivial, proprietary, nonproprietary, generic, or trade names.

Roche pRED decided to address this problem and equip their medicinal chemists with a chemically-aware text mining tool (Artemis) that would remove the need for manual searches and data-wrangling, and present the data in a user- and analytics-friendly environment for further exploration. Daniel Stoffler and Raul Rodriguez-Esteban, Roche, presented this work in their talk "ARTEMIS - A Text Mining Tool for Chemists" at Linguamatics Spring Text Mining Conference in 2017.