Innovative Tools developed by SIS Pharmacy support COVID-19 research

PubPharm provides up-to-date resources, e.g. preprints from the archives bioRxiv, ChemRxiv und, arXiv. Via this search up-to-date publications with a focus on COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 can be found in PubPharm. In addition, search results can be limited using the new filter function “Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2”. When searching for a drug substance in PubPharm, automatically generated lists of related substances, diseases/symptoms, and genes are displayed.

PubPharm’s AI-based facetted-search was extended to diseases and symptoms. For example, it is now also possible to explore the learned relationships for current diseases such as COVID-19. Due to the ongoing pandemic, the links learned by the AI between SARS-COV-2 and drugs, other diseases/symptoms, and genes are also being shown. In the area of drug-centred innovative searches, an interface based on network views was also developed.

Network views offer the advantage that even complex, AI-learned relationships between several drugs, diseases/symptoms, and genes can be more easily discovered. The novel interface not only allows the exploration of pharmaceutical relationships but also provides access to the literature search capabilities of PubPharm.

The biomedical pipeline to annotate entities like drug substances and diseases in texts was applied to the CORD-19 collection. These annotations were made available to the research community: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08823.