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Abstract

Exploring Automatic Approaches to Extracting Pharmacogenomic Information from the Biomedical Literature.


Rance B, Demner-Fushman D, Rindflesch TC, Bodenreider O

Proceedings of the 2011 PSB Workshop on Mining the Pharmacogenomics Literature 2011

Abstract:

BACKGROUND: One aspect of personalized medicine is better adaptation of therapeutic drugs to the specific situation of a given patient, part of which is determined by his or her unique genetic make-up. Pharmacogenomics attempts to assess the influence of genetic variation on drug response. The biomedical literature is the primary vehicle for reporting the association between gene variants and drugs. This information is generally extracted from text and curated manually in order to create reference knowledge bases, such as PharmGKB, which offers several levels of curation for the articles it references (in depth, curated and non-curated). Information extraction can be also automated using natural language processing (NLP) tools. Here, we explore two NLP approaches (one recall- and the other precision-oriented) to extracting pharmacogenomic information from PubMed/MEDLINE citations, which we compare to PharmGKB. METHODS: On the one hand, we extract drug-gene associations in a given article using MetaMap to identify drugs and links provided by the Entrez system between PubMed (articles) and Entrez Gene (genes). The second approach leverages SemRep for extracting named relations between genes and drugs from the title and abstract of articles. The two approaches were applied to a corpus of 47,315 articles indexed with “mutation” and exhibiting at least one drug name in the period 2001-2008. Drugs are restricted to ingredients in RxNorm and genes to human genes. Articles selected by our approaches are compared to articles listed as evidence by PharmGKB’s curators. We reviewed some of the articles selected by our approaches for the drug warfarin. RESULTS: Number of article-drug-gene associations identified in our corpus: 23,264 (MetaMap), 6504 (SemRep) and 1340 (PharmGKB). Proportion of reference articles in PharmGKB (N=470) also identified by our approaches: 6% (MetaMap), 2% (SemRep) overall; 0.9% (MetaMap), 0.3% (SemRep) for the in-depth curated variants (196 articles).The two genes whose variants are associated with warfarin (in-depth curation in PharmGKB) are VKORC1 and CYP2C9. These associations are also identified by MetaMap and SemRep. The gene CYP2C19 identified by our approaches is discussed in the context of warfarin, albeit not positively linked to this drug.


Rance B, Demner-Fushman D, Rindflesch TC, Bodenreider O. Exploring Automatic Approaches to Extracting Pharmacogenomic Information from the Biomedical Literature. 
Proceedings of the 2011 PSB Workshop on Mining the Pharmacogenomics Literature 2011

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