Wednesday 15 Oct

Pharmaceutical research is becoming more translational, more collaborative and more distributed. This has brought on a new set of Information Management challenges for all involved parties : dealing with data that is not only Big, but also comes from a large variety of open and proprietary sources and needs to be viewed from the angle of multiple disciplines. In this context, semantic enrichment has emerged as a critical Information Systems capability enabling the integration of diverse content, and its access from diverse viewpoints, with productivity benefits at all stages of the lifecycle. Through the lens of a corresponding Maturity Model, this session will investigate representative applications of semantics for pharma information, and underscore the trends shaping how we will manage, distribute, and access it in the future.

The aim of SEMCARE is to build a semantic data platform to support clinical trials. The platform will identify patient cohorts based on patient-level criteria (e.g. age, gender, diagnosis, symptoms, lab results) scattered in heterogeneous clinical data. As most of patient-level data is unstructured, language technologies are necessary to extract and exploit the relevant data. Our platform combines the power of full text search with text analytics and semantic web technologies for a hybrid semantic full-text search. SEMCARE addresses the ever growing need to exploit medical data from clinical trials and for monitoring and improving healthcare delivery. The platform has the potential to provide for a more efficient, scalable method of patient recruitment for clinical trials. SEMCARE will also be capable to detect undiagnosed patients with rare diseases based on sign and symptom combinations. This has the potential to speed up the research on this group of diseases, which constitute a highly attractive market for pharmaceutical companies. The SEMCARE consortium includes players from the demand and supply sides. Hospitals in three different European countries serve as pilot sites and have particular interests in applying SEMCARE in their clinical research activities. The companies Averbis GmbH and SYNAPSE have a clear interest in the exploitation of the results.