A significant amount of information about drug-related safety issues such as adverse effects are published in medical case reports that can only be explored by human readers due to their unstructured nature. The work presented here aims at generating a systematically annotated corpus that can support the development and validation of methods for the automatic extraction of drug-related adverse effects from medical case reports. The documents are systematically double annotated in various rounds to ensure consistent annotations. The annotated documents are finally harmonized to generate representative consensus annotations. In order to demonstrate an example use case scenario, the corpus was employed to train and validate models for the classification of informative against the non-informative sentences. A Maximum Entropy classifier trained with simple features and evaluated by 10-fold cross-validation resulted in the F₁ score of 0.70 indicating a potential useful application of the corpus.

Changes in drug labels can be predicted automatically using data and text mining techniques. Text mining technology is mature and well-placed to support the pharmacovigilance tasks.

BackgroundMultiple sclerosis (MS) is a disease of central nervous system that causes the removal of fatty myelin sheath from axons of the brain and spinal cord. Autoimmunity plays an important role in this pathology outcome and body's own immune system attacks on the myelin sheath causing the damage. The etiology of the disease is partially understood and the response to treatment cannot easily be predicted.ResultsWe presented the results obtained using 8 genetically predisposed randomly chosen individuals reproducing both the absence and presence of malfunctions of the Teff-Treg cross-balancing mechanisms at a local level. For simulating the absence of a local malfunction we supposed that both Teff and Treg populations had similar maximum duplication rates. Results presented here suggest that presence of a genetic predisposition is not always a sufficient condition for developing the disease. Other conditions such as a breakdown of the mechanisms that regulate and allow peripheral tolerance should be involved.ConclusionsThe presented model allows to capture the essential dynamics of relapsing-remitting MS despite its simplicity. It gave useful insights that support the hypothesis of a breakdown of Teff-Treg cross balancing mechanisms.