The next time you think you're suffering from information overload, consider the lowly biomedical researcher searching through 14 million abstracts in the National Library of Medicine's Medline database, looking for new drug interactions or a new cancer therapy. Who could read it all? Now there is software that can do the job and perhaps make important medical discoveries too.
The program is called Iridescent (for Implicit Relationship IDEntification by in-Silico Construction of an Entity-based Network from Text) and was created by bioinformatics researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Iridescent can scan all of the documents in Medline and also look for undiscovered correlations between studies.
Essentially, Iridescent analyzes data like a research scientist. It can recognize about half a million biomedical terms and variants and apply a statistical model to any discovered correlations. For example, Iridescent can turn up new uses for drugssuch as its discovery that an anti-psychotic medication can also be used to slow the progression of a particular heart disease.
Many drug companies, such as Novartis and etexx Biopharmaceuticals, now use Iridescent's technology. Iridescent will become more efficient over time at predicting potentially dangerous drug interactions. Such an early warning system could be just what the doctor ordered.