NLP has a lot of potentional to transform the pharmaceutical industry
News today from a few sources that Cambridge, UK based Linguamatics has sealed a deal with Selventa, “a personalized healthcare company focused on stratification of patients and development of predictive biomarker panels based on disease-driving mechanisms”. The official word is that Linguamatics is going to use their NLP engine to mine healthcare literature to “efficiently extract complex life science knowledge in a computable, structured, biological expression language (BEL)… that can be used to interpret large-scale experimental data”.
I was fortunate to meet a brilliant researcher from Selventa this September at a Cambridge Semantic Web Meetup at MIT. Dr Julian Ray gave a talk on the biological expression language (BEL). As the two companies have only just inked this deal, it was probably before they were licensing any Linguamatics lingware, but I was definitely impressed by what I saw. Selventa already brings some impressive technology to the table.
Reading between the lines, I think I have an idea of what’s going on here. Selventa’s model is to plug into a huge database of pharmaceutical research, and then search for statistical correlations between symptoms (sore throat, etc), existing pharmaceutical solutions (Tylenol, aspirin, etc), and proteins that occur often with these in the literature. The idea is that you can actually predict which new drugs will be effective treatments for symptoms simply by looking for compounds that occur often with them in experimental data, without actually doing any testing. Dr Ray called this predictive ability “the holy grail” of bioinformatic techology, because pharmaceutical companies could save shitloads of money and preepmt market trends. Unfortunately, this description of the technology underlines Selventa’s difficulties with performing good NLP on their sources. His presentation attracted a lot of criticism because of the low precision it got against the target corpus, and the possibilties for predicting the wrong (and potentially deadly) treatment for a symptom.
My guess is that they’re contracting Linguamatics to add the the British company’s secret sauce to their existing platform, so that they can achieve better precision and hopefully reach this holy grail of pharmaceutical text analysis. More power to them, I say – but they should watch out for other Cambridge startups like Entagen, who are already demonstrating more impressive results. More on them later.
[HiveFire NLP] via [Semantic Web] via [Drug Discovery and Development]
Just out of curiosity, what’s your experience in the field like? I searched around the site and couldn’t find a bio or anything. Either way, thanks for the blog post!
No problem! My landing page/bio is a level up at bpiche.com
good art is art that during the Renaissance time artists painted! Michelangelo, Da Vinci as well as Raphael as excellent examples of good art! they are the kind of art that people want to see, apppreciate, where time was put into it, where there is always a theme, where the colors and techniques start to vary with the change of time and where one actually look at a painting and interpret what he or she sees because it looks so realistic and human like! the good art has high expectations and none the less, and take Michelangeo and the Sistine Ceilin and compare that to Picasso-not that i have something against him! Michelangelo shows expressions, emotion, light, darkness, did a fresco on the cupola of a chapel as well as had a theme for it and nailed it! everything when you look at it seems in its place, as though realistic, the colors vibrant yet pastel, the themes changing and the mystery is still there. Picasso on the other hand as well as other modern artists consider art taking some paint and throwing it on the canvas or making copies of the mona lisa face multiple times in color! i call that a kid’s work because i can give my brother and his friends some paint and canvas and they could come up with the same stuff the so called “artists” come up with the same things or even better! art in todays society especially good art is what Europeans have in their museums such as the Louvre and D’Orsay and at Versailles too! that is art, good art to be more specific since it is not something done in a hurrty but rather with sophistication and with class! that is what sets the two arts apart: good art has more class to it while the modern art does not and yes art art defined by the society and their standards as always!
Great! thanks for the share!
Arron
As I was browsing the internet, I searched for a lot interesting post. I found many but not as admirable as this. Can I use this for the research study I am working on and of course with the full credit to you, dear writer?
Sure!