Blog | Linguamatics

April 7 2020

In the rapidly evolving fight against COVID-19, IQVIA is committed to deploying our resources and capabilities to help everyone in healthcare do what needs to be done, and to keep things moving forward. Pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations, governments, and the broader scientific communities around the world are working to assess the impact of the virus, and how this can be tackled.

As part of this effort, it’s critical to have access to the best evidence from a broad range of data, including scientific literature, clinical trials and other textual sources. For intelligence from unstructured text, Linguamatics can help. Our Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology enables fast, systematic, and comprehensive insight generation from unstructured text. These sources can include scientific literature, clinical trial records, preprints, internal sources, social media, and news. Capturing key information from these many sources and synthesizing into one place – an Evidence Hub – gives users a deeper understanding of everything that’s going on. This approach can speed answers to key questions to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, such as:

IQVIA Linguamatics NLP Earns 2019 Fierce Innovation Award

January 30 2020

We are proud to announce that the IQVIA Linguamatics Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform was recently awarded Questex’s 2019 Fierce Innovation Award – Life Sciences Edition in the Data Analytics/Business Intelligence category. In addition, the NLP healthcare platform was recognized with a Best in Show honor for ‘Best Technology Innovation’.

Sponsored by the publisher of FierceBiotech and FiercePharma, the Fierce Innovation Awards identify and showcase outstanding innovation that is driving improvements and transforming the healthcare industry. An expert panel of judges reviews all submissions to determine which companies demonstrate innovative solutions, technologies and services that have the potential to make the greatest impact for biotech and pharma companies.

The IQVIA Linguamatics NLP platform supports life sciences organizations seeking to speed up drug development and improve patient outcomes by breaking down data silos, boosting innovation, enhancing quality and reducing risk and complexity. NLP is an artificial intelligence technology that transforms unstructured and semi-structured text into normalized, structured data suitable for analysis or to drive machine learning algorithms.

The platform uses sophisticated algorithms to identify, extract and connect key concepts, facts and relationships buried in the text rather than just retrieve documents based on keyword search. Key solution areas include:

Leverage Natural Language Processing to make your data FAIR-er

June 18 2019

NLP for FAIRification of unstructured data

Data is the lifeblood of all research, and pharmaceutical research is no exception. Clean accurate integrated data sets promise to provide the substrate for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models that can assist with better drug discovery and development. Using data in the most effective and efficient way is critical - and improving scientific data management and stewardship through the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles will improve pharma efficiency and effectiveness.

What is FAIR and how can NLP contribute?

The FAIR principles were first proposed in 2016, and this initial paper triggered not just discussions (see the recent Pistoia review paper), but in many organizations, the paper triggered action.

We are seeing applications of natural language processing (NLP) in FAIRification of unstructured data. Around 80% of information needed for pharma decision-making is in unstructured formats, from scientific literature to safety reports, clinical trial protocols to regulatory dossiers and more.

NLP can contribute to FAIRification of these data in a number of ways. NLP enables effective use of ontologies, a key component in data interoperability. Ensuring that life science entities are referred consistently across different data sources enables these data to be integrated and accessible for machine operations. Using a combination of strategies (e.g. ontologies, linguistic rules) NLP can transform unstructured data into formal representations, whether individual concept identifiers, or relationships such as RDF.

Natural Language Processing on Tour - a Spring Road Trip

Academic Medical Center

June 17 2019

Elizabeth Marshall (MD)

Spring has sprung!

Spring has always felt like a magical season to me. The dormancy of winter is set aside to allow for new growth, and the strategically placed butterfly garden outside my window is active with metamorphosis. Flowers transform overnight. As the transformation happens outside, I find many inner opportunities for growth taking place as well. I have personally experienced and observed in others that Spring brings out curiosity, the thirst of new discoveries, and the desire for inner growth.

The season of inspiration - even in healthcare

In healthcare, I attribute this to those striving for discoveries for better patient care. Luckily this “spring fever” has proven to be bountiful, and we have been able to witness this first hand. Throughout the country this Spring, Linguamatics has had the honor to host several one day seminars (and another in San Francisco yet to come!). These seminars have focused on how Artificial Intelligence, through Natural Language Processing (NLP), has inspired new discoveries covering a wide spectrum of applications in healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Proving once again that the talents from both industries work together for one common goal - to improve human health.

How are healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations using NLP?

Alyssa Hahn, University of Iowa, “Performance of NLP-Based Phenome Extraction from the EMR”

Novo Nordisk wins Bio-IT World 2019 Innovative Practices Award

April 26 2019

Novo Nordisk uses Linguamatics NLP in groundbreaking project to mine real world data insights

Novo Nordisk has received one of the three Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Awards for their workflow to integrate NLP to generate actionable insights from real world data, during the Bio-IT World Conference and Exposition 2019 in Boston. Linguamatics, the leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution provider, is the Novo Nordisk NLP technology partner. Linguamatics and Novo Nordisk were among the 9 projects and 15 organizations selected as finalists for this prestigious award.

Bio-IT World’s Innovative Practices Award recognizes partnerships and projects pushing the life science industry forward, by highlighting examples of how technology innovations and strategic initiatives can be powerful forces for change. After winning Bio-IT World’s Best of Show Judges’ Prize in 2018 with iScite 2.0, the Linguamatics team is extremely proud of this new accomplishment.

Novo Nordisk is a global healthcare company with more than 90 years of innovation and leadership in diabetes care. This heritage has given them experience and capabilities that also enable them to help people defeat other serious chronic conditions: diabetes, haemophilia, growth disorders and obesity.