The Translational Medicine Ontology and Knowledge Base: driving personalized medicine by bridging the gap between bench and bedside

Luciano et al. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2011, 2(Suppl 2):S1 http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/2/S2/S1 PROCEEDINGS JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL SEMANTICS Open Access The Translational Medicine Ontology and Knowledge Base: driving personalized medicine by bridging the gap between bench and bedside Joanne S Luciano1,2*, Bosse Andersson3, Colin Batchelor4, Olivier Bodenreider5, Tim Clark6,7, Christine K Denney8, Christopher Domarew9, Thomas Gambet10, Lee Harland11, Anja Jentzsch12, Vipul Kashyap13, Peter Kos6, Julia Kozlovsky14, Timothy Lebo1, Scott M Marshall15,16, James P McCusker1, Deborah L McGuinness1, Chimezie Ogbuji17, Elgar Pichler18, Robert L Powers2, Eric Prud’hommeaux10, Matthias Samwald19,20,21, Lynn Schriml22, Peter J Tonellato6, Patricia L Whetzel23, Jun Zhao24, Susie Stephens25, Michel Dumontier26* From Bio-Ontologies 2010: Semantic Applications in Life Sciences Boston, MA, USA. 9-10 July 2010 * Correspondence: . edu; 1 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA 26 Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada Abstract Background: Translational medicine requires the integration of knowledge using heterogeneous data from health care to the life sciences. Here, we describe a collaborative effort to produce a prototype Translational Medicine Knowledge Base (TMKB) capable of answering questions relating to clinical practice and pharmaceutical drug discovery. Results: We developed the Translational Medicine Ontology (TMO) as a unifying ontology to integrate chemical, genomic and proteomic data with disease, treatment, and electronic health records. We demonstrate the use of Semantic Web technologies in the integration of patient and biomedical data, and reveal how such a knowledge base can aid physicians in providing tailored patient care and facilitate the recruitment of patients into active clinical trials. Thus, patients, physicians and researchers may explore the knowledge base to better understand therapeutic options, efficacy, and mechanisms of action. Conclusions: This work takes an important step in using Semantic Web technologies to facilitate integration of relevant, distributed, external sources and progress towards a computational platform to support personalized medicine. Availability: TMO can be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/ translationalmedicineontology and TMKB can be accessed at http://tm. semanticscience.org/sparql. © 2011 Luciano et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Luciano et al. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2011, 2(Suppl 2):S1 http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/2/S2/S1 Background A major element of personalized medicine involves the identification of therapeutic regimes that are safe and effective for specific patients. This contrasts the “one-sizefits-all” well-known concept of “blockbuster” drugs, which are considered safe and effective for the entire population. The concept of targeted patient groups falls inbetween these two extremes with the identification of therapeutic regimes targeted to be safe and effective for specific patient groups with similar characteristics [1]. A number of factors have contributed to a decline in the emphasis of blockbuster therapeutics and a corresponding rise in the quest for tailored therapeutics or personalized medicine. Essential to the realization of personalized medicine is the development of information systems capable of providing accurate and timely information about potentially complex relationships between individual patients, drugs, and tailored therapeutic options. The demands of personalized medicine include integrating knowledge across data repositories that have been developed for divergent uses, and do not normally adhere to a unified schema. This paper demonstrates the integration of such knowledge across multiple heterogeneous datasets. We show the formation of queries that span these datasets, connecting the information required to support the goal of personalized medicine from both the research and the clinical perspectives. Integration of the patient electronic health record (EHR) with publicly accessible information creates new opportunities and challenges for clinical research and patient care. For example, one challenge is that the complexity of the information provided to the clinician must not impair the clinician’s ability to accurately and rapidly prescribe drugs that are safe and effective for a specific patient, and covered by the patient’s insurance provider. An example opportunity is that EHRs enable the identification of adverse events and outbreak awareness and provide a rich set of longitudinal data, from which researchers and clinicians can study disease, co-morbidity and treatment outcome. Moreover, the increased desire to rapidly translate drug and gene-based drug therapy to clinical practice depends on the comprehensive integration of the entire breadth of patient data to facilitate and evaluate drug development [2]. Thus, EHR integration could create the ideal conditions under which new or up-to-date evidencebased guidelines for disease diagnosis and treatment can emerge. Although supplying patient data to the scientific community presents both technical and social challenges [3], a comprehensive system that maintains individual privacy but provides a platform for the analysis of the full extent of patient data is vital for personalized treatment and objective prediction of drug response [4]. The impetus to collect and disseminate relevant patient-specific data for use by clinicians, researchers, and drug developers has never been stronger. Simultaneously the impetus to provide patient-specific data to patients in a manner that is accurate, timely, and understandable, has also never been stronger. This motivation takes specific form in the US where health care providers who want stimulus-funded reimbursement from recent electronic health funding, to implement or expand the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) in care practices, must achieve “meaningful use.” An EMR is an electronic record of health-related information on an individual that is created, gathered, managed, and consulted by licensed clinicians and staff from a single organization who are involved in the individual’s health and care. An electronic health record (EHR) is an aggregate electronic record of health-related Page 2 of 21 Luciano et al. Journal of Biomedical Semantics 2011, 2(Suppl 2):S1 http://www.jbiomedsem.com/content/2/S2/S1 information on an individual that is created and gathered cumulatively across more than one health care organization and is managed and consulted by licensed clinicians and staff involved in the individual’s health and care. By these definitions, an EHR is an EMR with interopera (...truncated)