Concept-based semi-automatic classification of drugs.

The anatomical therapeutic chemical (ATC) classification system maintained by the World Health Organization provides a global standard for the classification of medical substances and serves as a source for drug repurposing research. Nevertheless, it lacks several drugs that are major players in the global drug market. In order to establish classifications for yet unclassified drugs, this paper presents a newly developed approach based on a combination of information extraction (IE) and machine learning (ML) techniques.

Identification of histone modifications in biomedical text for supporting epigenomic research.

Background: Posttranslational modifications of histones influence the structure of chromatine and in such a way take part in the regulation of gene expression. Certain histone modification patterns, distributed over the genome, are connected to cell as well as tissue differentiation and to the adaption of organisms to their environment. Abnormal changes instead influence the development of disease states like cancer.

Detection of IUPAC and IUPAC-like chemical names.

Motivation: Chemical compounds like small signal molecules or other biological active chemical substances are an important entity class in life science publications and patents. Several representations and nomenclatures for chemicals like SMILES, InChI, IUPAC or trivial names exist. Only SMILES and InChI names allow a direct structure search, but in biomedical texts trivial names and Iupac like names are used more frequent.

Knowledge environments representing molecular entities for the virtual physiological human.

In essence, the virtual physiological human (VPH) is a multiscale representation of human physiology spanning from the molecular level via cellular processes and multicellular organization of tissues to complex organ function. The different scales of the VPH deal with different entities, relationships and processes, and in consequence the models used to describe and simulate biological functions vary significantly. Here, we describe methods and strategies to generate knowledge environments representing molecular entities that can be used for modelling the molecular scale of the VPH.

Identification of new drug classification terms in textual resources.

Unlabelled: Knowledge about biological effects of small molecules helps in the understanding of biological processes and supports the development of new therapeutic agents. DrugBank is a high quality database providing such information about drugs that contains annotation of drug effects and classification of therapeutic effects. However, to broaden the scope of such a database in classifying and annotating drugs, systems for automatic extraction of classification terms and the corresponding annotation of drugs are needed.

Information extraction in the life sciences: perspectives for medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and toxicology.

Information extraction approaches have been successfully applied to mine the scientific literature in biology and medicine. So far, the main focus of research and development in this domain was on the recognition and extraction of gene and protein names in the context of molecular biology and genome research and on disease names and other medical terms in the context of clinical research. Similar to biology and medical sciences, medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and toxicology are descriptive sciences.