Over the last few decades the pharmaceutical industry has generated a vast corpus of knowledge on the safety and efficacy of drugs. Much of this information is contained in toxicology reports, which summarise the results of animal studies designed to analyse the effects of the tested compound, including unintended pharmacological and toxic effects, known as treatment-related findings. Despite the potential of this knowledge, the fact that most of this relevant information is only available as unstructured text with variable degrees of digitisation has hampered its systematic access, use and exploitation. Text mining technologies have the ability to automatically extract, analyse and aggregate such information, providing valuable new insights into the drug discovery and development process. In the context of the eTRANSAFE project, we present PretoxTM (Preclinical Toxicology Text Mining), the first system specifically designed to detect, extract, organise and visualise treatment-related findings from toxicology reports. The PretoxTM tool comprises three main components: PretoxTM Corpus, PretoxTM Pipeline and PretoxTM Web App. The PretoxTM Corpus is a gold standard corpus of preclinical treatment-related findings annotated by toxicology experts. This corpus was used to develop, train and validate the PretoxTM Pipeline, which extracts treatment-related findings from preclinical study reports. The extracted information is then presented for expert visualisation and validation in the PretoxTM Web App.Scientific ContributionWhile text mining solutions have been widely used in the clinical domain to identify adverse drug reactions from various sources, no similar systems exist for identifying adverse events in animal models during preclinical testing. PretoxTM fills this gap by efficiently extracting treatment-related findings from preclinical toxicology reports. This provides a valuable resource for toxicology research, enhancing the efficiency of safety evaluations, saving time, and leading to more effective decision-making in the drug development process.

Scientific information extraction is fundamental for research and innovation, but is currently mostly a manual, time-consuming process. Text Mining tools (TMTs) enable automated, accurate and quick information extraction from text, but there is little precedent of their use in the biomaterials field. Here, we compare the ability of various TMTs to extract useful information from biomaterials abstracts. Focusing on the biocompatibility of polydioxanone, a biodegradable polymer for which there are relatively few scientific publications, we tested several tools ranging from machine learning approaches and statistical text analysis to MeSH indexing and domain-specific semantic tools for Named Entity Recognition. We also evaluated their output alongside a manual review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. The findings show that TMTs can be highly efficient and powerful for mapping biomaterials texts and rapidly yield up-to-date information. Here, TMTs enable one to identify dominating themes, see the evolution of specific terms and topics, and learn about key medical applications in biomaterials literature over the years. The analysis also shows that ambiguity around biomaterials nomenclature is a significant challenge in mining biomedical literature that is yet to be tackled. This research showcases the potential value of using Natural Language Processing and domain-specific tools to extract and organize biomaterials data.

Biomaterials research output has experienced an exponential increase over the last three decades. The majority of research is published in the form of scientific articles and is therefore available as unstructured text, making it a challenging input for computational processing. Computational tools are becoming essential to overcome this information overload. Among them, text mining systems present an attractive option for the automated extraction of information from text documents into structured datasets. This work presents the first automated system for biomaterial related information extraction from the National Library of Medicine's premier bibliographic database (MEDLINE) research abstracts into a searchable database. The system is a text mining pipeline that periodically retrieves abstracts from PubMed and identifies research and clinical studies of biomaterials. Thereafter, the pipeline identifies sixteen concept types of interest in the abstract using the Biomaterials Annotator, a tool for biomaterials Named Entity Recognition (NER). These concepts of interest, along with the abstract and relevant metadata are then deposited in DEBBIE, the Database of Experimental Biomaterials and their Biological Effect. DEBBIE is accessible through a web application that provides keyword searches and displays results in an intuitive and meaningful manner, aiming to facilitate an efficient mapping and organization of biomaterials information.

Thirteen pharmaceutical companies have shared and integrated preclinical and clinical data for creating computational resources that enhance translational drug safety assessment.

eTRANSAFE is a research project funded within the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), which aims at developing integrated databases and computational tools (the eTRANSAFE ToxHub) that support the translational safety assessment of new drugs by using legacy data provided by the pharmaceutical companies that participate in the project. The project objectives include the development of databases containing preclinical and clinical data, computational systems for translational analysis including tools for data query, analysis and visualization, as well as computational models to explain and predict drug safety events.

Biomaterials are synthetic or natural materials used for constructing artificial organs, fabricating prostheses, or replacing tissues. The last century saw the development of thousands of novel biomaterials and, as a result, an exponential increase in scientific publications in the field. Large-scale analysis of biomaterials and their performance could enable data-driven material selection and implant design. However, such analysis requires identification and organization of concepts, such as materials and structures, from published texts. To facilitate future information extraction and the application of machine-learning techniques, we developed a semantic annotator specifically tailored for the biomaterials literature. The Biomaterials Annotator has been implemented following a modular organization using software containers for the different components and orchestrated using Nextflow as workflow manager. Natural language processing (NLP) components are mainly developed in Java. This set-up has allowed named entity recognition of seventeen classes relevant to the biomaterials domain. Here we detail the development, evaluation and performance of the system, as well as the release of the first collection of annotated biomaterials abstracts. We make both the corpus and system available to the community to promote future efforts in the field and contribute towards its sustainability.