Semantic Annotation of Clinical Studies for Knowledge-Driven Drug Development

The rising costs of drug development make it imperative for pharmaceutical companies to quickly learn from knowledge generated in clinical trials. Timely access to successful study designs and trial outcomes can facilitate speed and quality improvements in decision-making at various stages. Utilization of information standards for extraction, integration and exploitation of structured and unstructured clinical study information could prove to be critical in this context This talk will describe our implementation of a semantic repository of clinical studies in a global clinical development organization. We will discuss the design of a semantic annotation platform for clinical study reports stored in large clinical document repositories. The extracted semantic annotations over clinical studies are integrated with structured information from a global trial execution database and stored in an organizational semantic repository. Beside clinical trial models the repository also incorporated and aligned existing thesauri, dictionaries and taxonomies in a syntactically coherent and semantically sound ontology.