Search PubMedSearch

PubMed · 40097274

Lit-OTAR framework for extracting biological evidences from literature.

Abstract

SUMMARY: The lit-OTAR framework, developed through a collaboration between Europe PMC and Open Targets, leverages deep learning to revolutionize drug discovery by extracting evidence from scientific literature for drug target identification and validation. This novel framework combines named entity recognition for identifying gene/protein (target), disease, organism, and chemical/drug within scientific texts, and entity normalization to map these entities to databases like Ensembl, Experimental Factor Ontology, and ChEMBL. Continuously operational, it has processed over 39 million abstracts and 4.5 million full-text articles and preprints to date, identifying more than 48.5 million unique associations that significantly help accelerate the drug discovery process and scientific research >29.9 m distinct target-disease, 11.8 m distinct target-drug, and 8.3 m distinct disease-drug relationships. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The results are accessible through Europe PMC's SciLite web app (https://europepmc.org/) and its annotations API (https://europepmc.org/annotationsapi), as well as via the Open Targets Platform (https://platform.opentargets.org/). The daily pipeline is available at https://github.com/ML4LitS/otar-maintenance, and the Open Targets ETL processes are available at https://github.com/opentargets.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Santosh Tirunagari, Shyamasree Saha, Aravind Venkatesan, Daniel Suveges, Miguel Carmona, Annalisa Buniello, David Ochoa, Johanna McEntyre, Ellen McDonagh, Melissa Harrison. 2025-03-29. Lit-OTAR framework for extracting biological evidences from literature.. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics%2Fbtaf113

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related citations

Proteomics-Driven Strategies for Proximity-Inducing Drug Discovery.

In recent years, proximity-inducing drugs have emerged as a novel therapeutic modality that induces or stabilizes protein-protein interactions, especially by recruiting effector proteins to specific target proteins, thereby achieving functions beyond traditional inhibitors. The potential of proximity-inducing drugs extends beyond targeted protein degradation (TPD), as studies have demonstrated their ability to regulate biological processes such as signal transduction, gene transcription, chromatin regulation, and protein trafficking by modulating protein interaction networks. Rational discovery of proximity-inducing drugs requires clarifying their effects on protein-protein interactions, determining drug selectivity, and developing suitable ligands for drug construction. Proteomics has become a central technology in drug discovery, enabling global identification of the direct drug targets and systematic characterization of proteome-wide downstream responses. This provides a more refined map of drug mechanisms. In parallel, advances in machine learning applied to proteomic data, together with the expansion of proteome-wide ligandability maps, are further accelerating the discovery and optimization of proximity-inducing drugs. This review summarizes recent advances of proximity-inducing drugs, with a particular emphasis on how proteomics facilitates target space expansion, drug efficacy optimization, and ligandability discovery, alongside the emerging contributions of machine learning. Collectively, these insights aim to support the rational development of next-generation proximity-inducing drugs.

Drug Discovery

Target and biomarker exploration portal for drug discovery.

MOTIVATION: The discovery of novel drug targets and precision biomarkers remains a major challenge in drug development, with traditional differential expression analysis often overlooking key regulatory proteins. Here, we present a novel, web-based bioinformatics tool, the Target and Biomarker Exploration Portal (TBEP), designed to accelerate the drug discovery process by integrating large-scale biomedical data with network analysis techniques. RESULTS: TBEP harnesses machine-learning approaches to mine and combine multimodal datasets, including human genetics, functional genomics, and protein-protein interaction networks, to decode causal disease mechanisms and uncover novel therapeutic targets and precision biomarkers for specific phenotypes. A unique feature of the tool is its ability to process large-scale data in real-time, facilitated by an efficient cloud-based architecture. Additionally, the tool incorporates an integrated large language model (LLM), which assists researchers in exploring and interpreting complex biological relationships within the generated networks and multi-omics data using natural language (English). By offering an intuitive, interactive interface, the LLM enhances the exploration of biological insights, making it easier for scientists to derive actionable conclusions. This powerful integration of network analysis, multi-omics data, and LLM provides a robust framework for accelerating the identification of novel drug targets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The tool is publicly available at https://tbep.missouri.edu. The source code, documentation and installation instructions are available at GitHub repository: https://github.com/mizzoudbl/tbep.

Drug Discovery

The limitations of small molecule and genetic screening in phenotypic drug discovery.

Phenotypic screens carried out with functional genomics or small molecules have led to novel biological insights, revealed previously unknown targets for drug discovery programs, and provided starting points for the development of first-in-class therapies. Despite being valuable research tools, genetic and compound screening also have significant limitations. This perspective aims to shed a light on those limitations and provide mitigation strategies when available, with a goal of helping phenotypic screening practitioners gain an understanding of how and when to best utilize either approach.

Drug Discovery