Building a drug development database: challenges in reliable data availability

A Road Map to Creating a High-Quality Clinical Database in Plastic Surgery

BACKGROUND

Detailed in-house databases are a staple of surgical research and a crucial source of data for many studies from which clinical guidelines are built. Despite the importance of generating a clear and thorough developmental design, the literature on database creation and management is limited. In this article, the authors present their stepwise single-institution process of developing a clinical facial fracture database.

METHODS

The authors outline the process of development of a large single-institution clinical pediatric facial fracture database. The authors highlight critical steps from conception, regulatory approval, data safety/integrity, human resource allocation, data collection, quality assurance, and error remediation. The authors recorded patient characteristics, comorbidities, details of the sustained fracture, associated injuries, hospitalization information, treatments, outcomes, and follow-up information on Research Electronic Data Capture. Protocols were created to ensure data quality assurance and control. Error identification analysis was subsequently performed on the database to evaluate the completeness and accuracy of the data.

RESULTS

A total of 4451 records from 3334 patients between 2006 and 2021 were identified and evaluated to generate a clinical database. Overall, there were 259 incorrect entries of 120,177 total entries, yielding a 99.8% completion rate and a 0.216% error rate.

CONCLUSIONS

The quality of clinical research is intrinsically linked to the quality and accuracy of the data collection. Close attention must be paid to quality control at every stage of a database setup. More studies outlining the process of database design are needed to promote transparent, accurate, and replicable research practices.

The rocky road to translational science: An analysis of Clinical and Translational Science Awards

Studies point out that the productivity decline in biomedicine is in significant part due to difficulties in translating basic science into clinical application. To promote translational research, the US NIH launched the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program in 2006. Prior evaluations of the CTSA program often assumed that the key to translation is inter-organizational collaboration or multidisciplinarity; hence, changes in either of these were measured as evidence of translational science. However, using novel measures of translational science, this study examines the relationship between CTSAs and translational science per se. We define ‘translational science’ as basic science that has translational features, and we employ two distinct, complementary measures of translational science based on publication data. Using 115 Carnegie R1 universities and their translational science publications, we find that receiving a CTSA does not obviously cause receiving institutions to conduct more translational science. Furthermore, our Principal Investigator-level analysis shows that those who received direct support from the CTSA program had already generated more translational science than others and that their research behavior did not change significantly after receiving a CTSA. Future evaluation research can adopt our novel measures of translational science and evaluation research design in the assessment of translational research activities. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for science governance.

Phyotochemical candidates repurposing for cancer therapy and their molecular mechanisms

Though limited success through chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery has been obtained for efficient cancer therapy for modern decades, cancers are still considered high burden to human health worldwide to date. Recently repurposing drugs are attractive with lower cost and shorter time compared to classical drug discovery, just as Metformin from Galega officinalis, originally approved for treating Type 2 diabetes by FDA, is globally valued at millions of US dollars for cancer therapy. As most previous reviews focused on FDA approved drugs and synthetic agents, current review discussed the anticancer potential of phytochemicals originally approved for treatment of cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, infectious diarrhea, depression and malaria with their molecular mechanisms and efficacies and suggested future research perspectives.

Drug databases and their contributions to drug repurposing

Drug repurposing is an interesting field in the drug discovery scope because of reducing time and cost. It is also considered as an appropriate method for finding medications for orphan and rare diseases. Hence, many researchers have proposed novel methods based on databases which contain different information. Thus, a suitable organization of data which facilitates the repurposing applications and provides a tool or a web service can be beneficial. In this review, we categorize drug databases and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Surprisingly, to the best of our knowledge, the importance and potential of databases in drug repurposing are yet to be emphasized. Indeed, the available databases can be divided into several groups based on data content, and different classes can be applied to find a new application of the existing drugs. Furthermore, we propose some suggestions for making databases more effective and popular in this field.