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Searching for the right words
Text mining tools enable research scientists to scan huge
volumes of drug data. Sandeep Moudgal profiles this technology
Shome Natha Mitra, Chief Scientific Officer, Brainwave solutions |
Information Technology has become an integral part of any
and every industry today. The pharma industry is no exception. From the stage
of formulation to manufacturing and logistical support, IT involvement has increased
over the years. ERP solutions are a prerequisite for any manufacturing unit
in this industry.
Perhaps the most important stage of any drug manufacturing
is at its formulation level. With genomic, computational chemistry and computational
biology (still in its infancy in India) playing a vital role in drug manufacturing,
the role of IT has increased manifold for the Indian pharmaceutical industry.
Looking for a needle in the haystack
A recent venture in producing solutions, Brainwave Biosolutions provides various
services to pharma manufacturers in speeding up drug formulations and manufacturing.
"The industry demands, going by reports, will touch nearly $36 million,
for text mining solutions alone," says Shome Nath Mitra, Chief Scientific
Officer, Brainwave.
"Each scientist has his own questions while working
on a certain drug formulation," says Mitra on the potential of their text
mining solution, ‘Gene Minerva’. "We put the scientist at the
helm and get the required inputs according to his queries," he adds. Developed
on natural language processing (NLP), it is for the convenience of scientists
in reducing the time consuming efforts of going through thousands of previous
scholarly papers.
When formulating a new drug, the biggest challenge faced by the scientists is
going through the millions of words that have been put down on paper previously
by experts. Text-mining solutions are meant for these challenges. It provides
the scientists with the exact phrase or compound, for which the scientists are
searching texts from various journals and their own database.
Studying those papers and extracting the exact phrase pertinent to the scientist
is a time consuming exercise. It is claimed that with the help of the text mining
solutions, a scientist can achieve nearly 90 percent accuracy on the false positive
information (where the information derived is filtered to the point of actual
requirement) retrieved for the scientist in the database and cut down on the
time to almost one-fourth of the manual work that was prevalent in the early
days of the pharma industry.
"The previous industry mentality towards external software assistance for
their formulations as being an overhead cost has changed," says Mitra.
Brainwave Biosolutions has today been approached by one of the leading medical
journals to provide them with a solution to have an electronic version of its
papers that can be used by scientists in the future.
Although, there seems to be no or little usage of the text
mining solutions in India, it is a technology that is sure to catch on as more
Indian pharma companies, research institutes and universities start looking
at offering drug related studies as a viable revenue stream.
editorial.ep@expressindia.com
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