FDA uses Linguamatics to boost drug safety

Linguamatics, a Cambridge UK company specialising in text mining technology, has secured a remarkable coup with the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research has licensed the company’s I2E text mining platform to support laboratory research efforts on drug safety. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

Linguamatics says the deal reflects the continued growth in demand for NLP-based text mining as a key knowledge discovery and decision support tool in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare sectors.

During the term of the licence, the centre will use I2E to mine published literature and drug product labels to answer questions relating to a range of biomedical topics, including drug toxicity mechanisms and disease processes.

Linguamatics says that I2E’s NLP-based querying capabilities, coupled with its scalability and flexibility, mean it is ideally suited to answering many challenging, high value questions in life sciences and healthcare by unlocking knowledge buried in the scientific literature and other textual information.

Rather than just retrieving documents, I2E can rapidly identify, extract, synthesize and analyse specific, relevant facts and relationships, such as those between genes and diseases or compounds and side effects. Customers include nine of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies.

John Brimacombe, executive chairman at Linguamatics, said: “We are very pleased to welcome CDER/FDA as a customer. Their adoption of the I2E text mining platform reflects the continued growth in demand for NLP-based text mining as a key knowledge discovery and decision support tool in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and healthcare sectors.”

The FDA is an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: John Brimacombe