Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the situation has started to reverse. With intuitive, tailored systems in our
personal lives, everyone expects a lot more in our working life.
In addition to increased expectations, there is signifi cantly more
demand for scientifi c informatics within the pharmaceutical environment.
With the rise of genomics, developments in metabolomics and proteomics,
the explosion of externally generated scientifi c knowledge, high-
throughput functional and phenotypic screening and the advent of next-
generation sequencing technologies, informatics is at the heart of most, if
not all, projects. This increased burden, coupled with a continual
squeezing of resources and budgets, has meant that open source and
often free alternatives are starting to be considered alongside the
mainstream commercial platforms.
14.2 The need to make sense of large
amounts of data
In AstraZeneca, our New Opportunities Innovative Medicines (iMED)
group focuses on disease indications of unmet patient need, outside of the
existing therapy areas (oncology, infection, respiratory, infl ammation,
cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, pain). As a small, virtual team, this is
achieved through in-licensing late stage opportunities, out-licensing
assets with world experts in different disease areas and evaluating new
hypotheses with our drugs with external contract research organisations
(CRO), key opinion leaders (KOL) and specialist disease companies.
Working in novel disease indications, without the years of knowledge
that is normally intrinsically captured, our informatics systems need to be
able to aggregate, standardise, analyse and visualise the huge wealth of
information. This is normally hidden in unstructured texts and requires
teasing out, either as structured text analytic queries or by generating
themes and trends.
Our approach initiated in 2008, was to provide a foundation layer that
would aggregate common unstructured, external scientifi c content into a
single, unifi ed search index. The initial programme focused on external
scientifi c abstracts, leveraging publications, patents, conference reports,
posters, PhD theses, UK/US grants and external clinical trials. Our
original licence agreements were re-negotiated to ensure the ability to
text-mine and analyse these sources. With new agreements in place, each
individual data type was parsed into a unifi ed format (described below),
loaded into a search index and then different business applications built
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