GlaxoSmithKline Japan selects SciBite Semantic platform to enhance pharmacovigilance capabilities

SciBite, a semantic analytics company, has announced that GlaxoSmithKline K.K. (GSK Japan), one of Japan’s leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, has selected SciBite’s Semantic Platform to enhance pharmacovigilance capabilities and deliver on its commitment to improve the quality of human life. TERMite, SciBite’s semantic named entity recognition (NER) and extraction engine, is currently being implemented to reduce the duration and enhance the certainty involved in constantly evaluating the vast body of English language research produced worldwide for potential safety information.

Prior to selecting SciBite’s Semantic Platform, GSK Japan initiated a Proof of Concept in order to assess whether the technology had the potential to complement a part of current manual pharmacovigilance processes used in Japan. To kick-start the project, the team created a custom-built thesaurus of GSK drug terms (or VOCab). Additionally, the pharmaceutical giant made use of SciBite’s TERMite Expressions (TExpress) module to search for phrases within texts suggestive of pharmacovigilance events. TExpress patterns were grouped together into subject-specific sets enabling the software to annotate sentences with category labels based on the phrases and keywords used. Following the annotation process, a bespoke novel ranking algorithm was employed to determine the overall importance of each article to GSK pharmacovigilance activities in Japan.

The power of the solution to provide huge advantages to GSK Japan in terms of process assurance and duration became apparent extremely quickly.  The result of the Proof of Concept was an ultra-fast processing period, providing accurate identification of all articles requiring reporting.

"SciBite is absolutely committed to our Japanese clients and is extremely pleased to welcome GSK Japan to our international group of customers," said Rob Greenwood, Chief Executive Officer, SciBite. "Our highly flexible technologies are proven by life science companies the world over to offer new, innovative opportunities to change the way they achieve their pharmacovigilance activities. We look forward to seeing how GSK Japan combine our market-leading technology and their internal human-centric expertise to evolve their pharmacovigilance capabilities."