HIV/AIDS. Bang for the buck

Using ontology-based annotation to profile disease research

BACKGROUND

Profiling the allocation and trend of research activity is of interest to funding agencies, administrators, and researchers. However, the lack of a common classification system hinders the comprehensive and systematic profiling of research activities. This study introduces ontology-based annotation as a method to overcome this difficulty. Analyzing over a decade of funding data and publication data, the trends of disease research are profiled across topics, across institutions, and over time.

RESULTS

This study introduces and explores the notions of research sponsorship and allocation and shows that leaders of research activity can be identified within specific disease areas of interest, such as those with high mortality or high sponsorship. The funding profiles of disease topics readily cluster themselves in agreement with the ontology hierarchy and closely mirror the funding agency priorities. Finally, four temporal trends are identified among research topics.

CONCLUSIONS

This work utilizes disease ontology (DO)-based annotation to profile effectively the landscape of biomedical research activity. By using DO in this manner a use-case driven mechanism is also proposed to evaluate the utility of classification hierarchies.

Can literature analysis identify innovation drivers in drug discovery?

Drug discovery must be guided not only by medical need and commercial potential, but also by the areas in which new science is creating therapeutic opportunities, such as target identification and the understanding of disease mechanisms. To systematically identify such areas of high scientific activity, we use bibliometrics and related data-mining methods to analyse over half a terabyte of data, including PubMed abstracts, literature citation data and patent filings. These analyses reveal trends in scientific activity related to disease studied at varying levels, down to individual genes and pathways, and provide methods to monitor areas in which scientific advances are likely to create new therapeutic opportunities.