Patients at the Heart of the Scientific Dialogue: An Industry Perspective

Pharmaceutical companies need to regularly communicate to patients all essential information about their medicines, especially data from the research studies that were conducted to evaluate the medicine’s benefits and risks. To do that, companies will need to make sure patients have access to and awareness of relevant information. This can be achieved by ensuring medical information is freely available to the reader, and working with publishers to facilitate open access (free) publications. Companies should also help improve patients’ understanding of medical terminology, offer simplified versions of scientific content, and deliver information through various formats (print versus digital, text versus audio versus video) to address different learning styles and literacy levels. This will empower patients with knowledge and improve shared decision-making. It will also be essential for pharmaceutical companies to involve patients in various stages of medicine development, such as getting their input on how the research studies for investigating these medicines are designed and reported to ensure relevant information to patients are well-captured and clear. This should also go in parallel with providing opportunities to elevate the patient voice through patient-partnered research and authorship on topics particularly relevant to them.

Improving access to oncology publications for advocates and people with cancer

Journal articles provide reliable and current information about cancer research. This can offer hope to people with cancer and help them make decisions about their care. Here, the authors suggest ways in which different groups may help people with cancer to find, view, and understand articles. For example, journals should make articles free to view if they describe research that could change patient care. Also, clear titles and easy-to-follow summaries or videos may help people to find relevant articles and understand the main findings. It is important to explore ways to best share research with all those whose lives it may affect.

Identifying and Validating Networks of Oncology Biomarkers Mined From the Scientific Literature

Biomarkers, as measurements of defined biological characteristics, can play a pivotal role in estimations of disease risk, early detection, differential diagnosis, assessment of disease progression and outcomes prediction. Studies of cancer biomarkers are published daily; some are well characterized, while others are of growing interest. Managing this flow of information is challenging for scientists and clinicians. We sought to develop a novel text-mining method employing biomarker co-occurrence processing applied to a deeply indexed full-text database to generate time-interval–delimited biomarker co-occurrence networks. Biomarkers across 6 cancer sites and a cancer-agnostic network were successfully characterized in terms of their emergence in the published literature and the context in which they are described. Our approach, which enables us to find publications based on biomarker relationships, identified biomarker relationships not known to existing interaction networks. This search method finds relevant literature that could be missed with keyword searches, even if full text is available. It enables users to extract relevant biological information and may provide new biological insights that could not be achieved by individual review of papers.

Abstract 252: Navigating networks of oncology biomarkers mined from the scientific literature: A new open research tool

Introduction: Oncology biomarkers have a pivotal role in diagnosis, prognosis, assessment of disease progression and the prediction of treatment efficacy. There are > 5000 known biomarkers; some are well characterised, while others are emerging as biomarkers of potential interest. Biomarker panels, incorporating combinations of biomarkers, are increasingly used to enhance the power and precision of testing.

Objective: We sought to identify key emerging biomarkers and biomarker relationships by applying analytical techniques to the corpus of recent scientific publications using an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform.

Methods: Biomarker targets were obtained from the Early Detection Research Network. Recent (<5 years old) publications mentioning biomarkers in six cancer types (bladder, breast, colorectal, lung, prostate and renal) were identified using Dimensions (a linked research knowledge system); emerging biomarkers were identified by number and growth in publications. For selected biomarkers, full text proximity searching was used to identify biomarker co-occurrence, which was visualized and characterized using network analysis and co-occurrence heatmaps per cancer type. Relationships between biomarkers were also assessed in an indication-agnostic dataset. Key biomarkers were identified by a measure of their network importance.

Results: A total of 720 biomarkers were analyzed, and 41 clusters identified across the cancer types. Data visualizations are available at https://reports.dimensions.ai/mined-oncology-biomarkers/

Conclusion: Using large-scale analytics of published literature, biomarkers across six cancer types were successfully characterized in terms of their emergence in the published literature and the context in which they are described. This novel AI-driven approach could help identify biomarkers and biomarker panels for exploration in a clinical setting.

Example clusters - growth rate is compound annual growth rate (CAGR)Cancer typeBiomarkers (n)Publications (n)Cluster key biomarkersCluster publication growth rate (%)Bladder49168CAV1/CXCL8/THBS153.1Breast2651593AREG/CXCL10/CXCL832.6Colorectal193921CAV1/CDCP1/MTHFR31.6Lung2231061SFTPC/C9/GPI41.4Prostate166717FABP5/FLNA/CAV131.6Renal44185CXCL10/CXCL8/CSNK2A149.5

Citation Format: Kim Wager, Dheepa Chari, Steffan Ho, Tomas J. Rees, Robert J. Schijvenaars. Navigating networks of oncology biomarkers mined from the scientific literature: A new open research tool [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2021; 2021 Apr 10-15 and May 17-21. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(13_Suppl):Abstract nr 252.