Drug Repurposing Hypothesis Generation Using the "RE:fine Drugs" System

The promise of drug repurposing is that existing drugs may be used for new disease indications in order to curb the high costs and time for approval. The ...

The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital

In mobile health (M-health), Short Message Service (SMS) has shown to improve disease related self-management and health service outcomes, leading to enhanced patient care. However, the hard limit on character size for each message limits the full value of exploring SMS communication in health care practices. To overcome this problem and improve the efficiency of clinical workflow, we developed an innovative system, MedTxting (available at http://medtxting.askhermes.org), which is a learning-based but knowledge-rich system that compresses medical texts in a SMS style. Evaluations on clinical questions and discharge summary narratives show that MedTxting can effectively compress medical texts with reasonable readability and noticeable size reduction. Findings in this work reveal potentials of MedTxting to the clinical settings, allowing for real-time and cost-effective communication, such as patient condition reporting, medication consulting, physicians connecting to share expertise to improve point of care.

MedTxting: learning based and knowledge rich SMS-style medical text contraction.

Physicians are increasingly using the Internet for finding medical information related to patient care. Wikipedia is a valuable online medical resource to be integrated into existing clinical question answering (QA) systems. On the other hand, Wikipedia contains a full spectrum of world's knowledge and therefore comprises a large partition of non-health-related content, which makes disambiguation more challenging and consequently leads to large overhead for existing systems to effectively filter irrelevant information. To overcome this, we have developed both unsupervised and supervised approaches to identify health-related articles as well as clinically relevant articles. Furthermore, we explored novel features by extracting health related hierarchy from the Wikipedia category network, from which a variety of features were derived and evaluated. Our experiments show promising results and also demonstrate that employing the category hierarchy can effectively improve the system performance.

Automatically identifying health- and clinical-related content in wikipedia.

Point of care access to knowledge from full text journal articles supports decision-making and decreases medical errors. However, it is an overwhelming task to search through full text journal articles and find quality information needed by clinicians. We developed a method to rate journals for a given clinical topic, Congestive Heart Failure (CHF). Our method enables filtering of journals and ranking of journal articles based on source journal in relation to CHF. We also obtained a journal priority score, which automatically rates any journal based on its importance to CHF. Comparing our ranking with data gathered by surveying 169 cardiologists, who publish on CHF, our best Multiple Linear Regression model showed a correlation of 0.880, based on five-fold cross validation. Our ranking system can be extended to other clinical topics.

An automated approach for ranking journals to help in clinician decision support.

The goal of this paper is to find relevant citations for clinicians' written content and make it more reliable by adding scientific articles as references and enabling the clinicians to easily update it using new information. The proposed approach uses information retrieval and ranking techniques to extract and rank relevant citations from MEDLINE for any given sentence. Additionally, this system extracts snippets of relevant content from ranked citations. We assessed our approach on 4,697 MEDLINE papers and their corresponding full-text on the subject of Heart Failure. We implemented multi-level and weight ranking algorithms to rank the citations. We demonstrate that using journal relevance and study design type improves results obtained from only using content similarity by approximately 40%. We also show that using full-text, rather than abstract text, leads to extracting higher quality snippets.

Towards Transforming Expert-based Content to Evidence-based Content.

The constant improvement and falling prices of whole human genome Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has resulted in rapid adoption of genomic information at both clinics and research institutions. Considered together, the complexity of genomics data, due to its large volume and diversity along with the need for genomic data sharing, has resulted in the creation of Application Programming Interface (API) for secure, modular, interoperable access to genomic data from different applications, platforms, and even organizations. The Genomics APIs are a set of special protocols that assist software developers in dealing with multiple genomic data sources for building seamless, interoperable applications leading to the advancement of both genomic and clinical research. These APIs help define a standard for retrieval of genomic data from multiple sources as well as to better package genomic information for integration with Electronic Health Records. This review covers three currently available Genomics APIs: a) Google Genomics, b) SMART Genomics, and c) 23andMe. The functionalities, reference implementations (if available) and authentication protocols of each API are reviewed. A comparative analysis of the different features across the three APIs is provided in the Discussion section. Though Genomics APIs are still under active development and have yet to reach widespread adoption, they hold the promise to make building of complicated genomics applications easier with downstream constructive effects on healthcare.

A Review on Genomics APIs.

The process of discovering new drugs has been extremely costly and slow in the last decades despite enormous investment in pharmaceutical research. Drug repurposing enables researchers to speed up the process of discovering other conditions that existing drugs can effectively treat, with low cost and fast FDA approval. Here, we introduce 'RE:fine Drugs', a freely available interactive website for integrated search and discovery of drug repurposing candidates from GWAS and PheWAS repurposing datasets constructed using previously reported methods in Nature Biotechnology. 'RE:fine Drugs' demonstrates the possibilities to identify and prioritize novelty of candidates for drug repurposing based on the theory of transitive Drug-Gene-Disease triads. This public website provides a starting point for research, industry, clinical and regulatory communities to accelerate the investigation and validation of new therapeutic use of old drugs.Database URL: http://drug-repurposing.nationwidechildrens.org.

Soheil Moosavinasab

Research Information Solutions and Innovation

The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Drug Repurposing Hypothesis Generation Using the "RE:fine Drugs" System

Soheil Moosavinasab

.css-o250i3{font-size:18px;font-family:Open Sans,sans-serif;line-height:21.6px;}Research Information Solutions and Innovation

The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Drug Repurposing Hypothesis Generation Using the "RE:fine Drugs" System

Research Information Solutions and Innovation