CTKG: A Knowledge Graph for Clinical Trials

Effective and successful clinical trials are essential in developing new drugs and advancing new treatments. However, clinical trials are very expensive and easy to fail. The high cost and low success rate of clinical trials motivate research on inferring knowledge from existing clinical trials in innovative ways for designing future clinical trials. In this manuscript, we present our efforts on constructing the first publicly available Clinical Trials Knowledge Graph, denoted as CTKG. CTKG includes nodes representing medical entities in clinical trials (e.g., studies, drugs and conditions), and edges representing the relations among these entities (e.g., drugs used in studies). Our embedding analysis demonstrates the potential utilities of CTKG in various applications such as drug repurposing and similarity search, among others. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement MedDRA® trademark is registered by ICH. This project was made possible, in part, by support from the National Science Foundation grant numbers (IIS-1855501, X.N.; IIS-1827472, X.N.; IIS-2133650, X.N.), an AWS Machine Learning Research Award (X.N.). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below: This study involves only openly available human data, which can be obtained from https://aact.ctti-clinicaltrials.org. I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable. Yes All data produced are available online at https://github.com/ninglab/CTKG.