Qibitz: Mining PubMed for Repurposable Drugs

TL;DR

This paper introduces Qibitz, a faceted search interface for PubMed that simplifies literature searches for drug repurposing, enabling faster, more accurate results and revealing new treatment patterns for various pathologies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel faceted search tool for PubMed that enhances literature exploration and uncovers potential drug repurposing opportunities.

Findings

Faceted search improves search efficiency and accuracy.

Patterns in search results suggest new drug repurposing options.

Tool facilitates discovery of treatments for genetically altered tumors.

Abstract

PubMed's current search interface makes it tedious to systematically search for medical and research literature on drugs that could potentially be used to treat a given pathology, including patients with genetically altered tumors. This is because physicians must search separately for each drug-pathology combination (or drug-gene combination). To streamline this process, this paper proposes adding a faceted search interface to PubMed. Faceted search is a common feature on e-commerce websites that allows users to filter search results by selecting different fields. By incorporating this technology, not only can physicians save time and improve the accuracy of their literature searches, but also presenting search results in this way makes patterns emerge, which can suggest new treatment options for a given pathology (including patients with genetically altered tumors).