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Speeding up new drug development with knowledge graphs

The pharmaceutical industry has long grappled with lengthy timelines and low success rates for new drugs and treatments.

Variations on standard tablets, which can be distinguished by both colour and shape.— Photo by Ragesoss (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Variations on standard tablets, which can be distinguished by both colour and shape.— Photo by Ragesoss (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Fluree and Vitality TechNet have entered into a partnership to enable pharmaceutical organizations to collaborate and accelerate drug discovery (as set out in a white paper). The partnership seeks to accelerate pharmaceutical programs to adopt the Identification of Medicinal Products ontology (IDMP-O) to simplify and standardize data assets.

The ISO standards for IDMP provide an internationally accepted framework to uniquely identify and describe medicinal products. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is expected to become the first health authority to enforce IDMP compliance before the end of 2024, and the U.S. FDA will likely follow shortly after that.

Poor alignment between regulatory bodies could prompt integration problems that lead to significant expenses, impede drug safety and stifle innovation.

Through this, the partnership sets out to safely accelerate the drug discovery processes and enable ongoing collaboration across internal departments and external partners, together with regulatory offices through semantics, knowledge graph and digital trust technologies.

The knowledge graph database (a way of organizing data that highlights relationships between data points. Graph representation looks like a network of interconnected points) and semantic data pipeline toolset comes from Fluree and these tools enable data sharing. The semantic pipeline provides a process for extracting all of the structured and unstructured data from documents and queries. This approach is used to process documents, metadata, and content, but it also processes incoming queries.

This provides an alternative to disparate pharma data silos, allowing organizations to implement an AI-driven data strategy for semantic alignment with the IDMP ontology.

Vitality TechNet helps to build a semantic data infrastructure for pharmaceutical organizations looking to enable digital Regulatory Information Management. The two sets of technologies combine to accelerate drug discovery.

The pharmaceutical industry has long grappled with lengthy timelines and low success rates for new drugs and treatments. A recent report found that drug development processes take an average of 10.5 years, with only a 7.9 percent probability of a drug candidate in “Phase I Discovery” receiving approval.

To improve this, efficient and credible data sharing can lead to better processes with the potential to cut costs and enable more collaboration across the pharmaceutical industry.

The Fluree and Vitality TechNet combination will enable RIM (Regulatory Information Management) functions to reduce error in regulatory submissions, streamline the identification of potential risks and enhance safety monitoring. This will allow for more efficient drug development processes and reduce the time and costs associated with late-stage failures.

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Written By

Dr. Tim Sandle is Digital Journal's Editor-at-Large for science news. Tim specializes in science, technology, environmental, business, and health journalism. He is additionally a practising microbiologist; and an author. He is also interested in history, politics and current affairs.

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