Mining electronic medical records (EMRs) for patient stratification of heart failure risk
Linguamatics
It is well known that the drug discovery and development process is lengthy, expensive and prone to failure. Starting from the selection of a novel target in discovery, through the multiple steps to regulatory approval, the overall probability of success is less than 1%.
One factor is that the majority of diseases are multifaceted, hence the challenge is identifying the most appropriate patient populations who will respond to specific interventions. A stratified approach has proven beneficial in a number of cancers and genetic diseases, and pharmaceutical companies have a strong interest in understanding how to find the sub-populations of patients to ensure the most appropriate therapies are tested in clinical trials, and applied in broader clinical use.
The ultimate aim of a stratified approach to medicine is to enable healthcare professionals to provide the “right treatment, for the right person, at the right dose, at the right time”; and there are many research initiatives (governmental, private, public) on-going to develop the appropriate knowledge and models.