Life Sciences
Carina Jenkins

Four million people die from diabetes annually. Novo Nordisk, a global healthcare company, has a mission to change that. Although it has a presence in 170 countries, is already helping 28 million patients, and supplies half of the world’s insulin, the company still faces an enormous challenge: novel drug approaches are needed, and drug development is a long, expensive process. The GLIA (Global Information & Analysis) team at Novo Nordisk aim to help by providing the best information possible to researchers and product teams.  

Using natural language processing (NLP) to extract information from real world data sources

The answers Novo Nordisk need are buried within a myriad of sources of unstructured real world data. These data sources include research papers, news reports, market information, patient use information, and more.

“Finding accurate information in an ever-growing ocean of information is becoming more important than ever,” explains Novo Nordisk senior information scientist Solmaz Gabery Adams.

Extensive research informs every step on the long path to delivering healthcare, from identifying needs and undertaking drug discovery to clinical trials and regulatory review before bringing new treatments to market. At every stage, Novo Nordisk researchers and managers must make crucial decisions, including which projects to advance and which projects to leave behind.

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Product
Paul Milligan

I am delighted to share that Linguamatics recently became an official AWS Technology Partner.  In recognition of this milestone, I wanted to provide some details about how AWS helps to underpin Linguamatics products, including:

  • I2E OnDemand, a powerful NLP text analytics cloud platform used by data scientists and informaticians at leading pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations around the globe
  • iScite, an award-winning Scientific Search cloud platform for end-user scientists and clinicians
  • Scalability and performance for semantic enrichment workflows

Rapid ROI and Reduced Cost of Ownership with Federated Text Mining in the Cloud

I2E OnDemand has been available for many years, providing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data mining for many of our customers - reducing their operating and capital expenditure costs, and providing instant, secure service for fast ROI.

In 2015, we migrated the platform to use AWS for the "gateway servers" that enable our Connected Data Technology to provide a unique federated text mining solution. Each customer organization has their own gateway servers; OnDemand plus customers can use these servers for managing their own content on I2E OnDemand. And with a range of different AWS  instances, Linguamatics can match customer requirements with the appropriate compute resource.

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Company news

Linguamatics I2E recognized for its unique and dynamic approach to meeting specific user needs across the industry

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Nov 14, 2018 — Based on its recent analysis of the global natural language processing (NLP) in life sciences Artificial Intelligence (AI) market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Linguamatics with the 2018 Global Product Leadership Award for its industry-leading I2E NLP text mining platform. This intelligent solution generates insights from a wide range of unstructured and semi-structured data, empowering clients to efficiently integrate AI into their operations.

"I2E's data-driven query development approach ensures reliable results even where there is no annotated training data available. It can obtain actionable results from unstructured data up to 1,000 times faster than the traditional keyword-based research," said Kamaljit Behera, industry analyst for Frost & Sullivan. "Linguamatics’ user-focused approach in product development differentiates its solutions from competitor products. For example, Linguamatics has also created a separate interface for less experienced users, allowing them to find and use optimized queries that have been previously created and published, thus making it easy for new users to access the platform’s power for their application areas. Furthermore, the platform employs intuitive reporting to present extracted information in a structured form."

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Healthcare
Elizabeth Marshall (MD)

We don’t know what we don’t know. 

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”

– Thomas A. Edison

Recently I had the honor to spend some time with some amazing people that are committed to quality in healthcare at the at 2018 HQI Conference in Huntington Beach- yes the sacrifices I must make- what an amazing venue! There, I learned that most of the attendants have been doing their reporting for quality via long hours of manual effort. I look at this in two ways…

1) I applaud such valiant efforts to achieve something worthwhile; and

2) are they unaware that technology can decrease their burden? These hard working professionals certainly cover the hard work and stick-to-itiveness. As for the third essential, this isn’t a case of a lack of common sense, it’s simply a case of…”we don’t know what we don’t know”.  

How do you ensure healthcare quality when the priority is quantity?

Data is everywhere. When it comes to data, what is one person’s garbage is another person’s treasure. It simply has to do with what question you have to ask. And when it comes to quality and reporting metrics it’s best to listen to the experts.  The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) exists to improve the quality of health care...they even say so on their web page.

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Life Sciences
Jane Reed

Drug safety is, of course, one of the central concerns of any drug development project. Right from the start, project teams want to know whether the target they are interested in has any links to adverse events. Or, when they get to lead series or lead compound, is there any evidence that similar compounds or compound classes have been shown to have side effects. If unexpected adverse events occur in clinical trials, again, project teams turn to literature and other sources to see if they can unearth a reason, mechanism, other evidence for this effect. And of course, post-market, pharmaceutical companies must regularly screen the worldwide scientific literature for potential adverse drug reactions, at least every two weeks.

Finding useful information from public sources can be daunting. There are so many different names for any particular gene target, or compound, or disease process, adverse event, side effect. Comprehensive search means using strings and strings of key words. And of course, what is really needed is evidence that a compound is causing an effect, not treating the disease. So, again, key word search doesn’t work well. And then, there are so many different data sources to search.

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