Abstract
With the novel COVID-19 pandemic disrupting and threatening the lives of millions, researchers and clinicians have been recently conducting clinical trials at an unprecedented rate to learn more about the virus and potential drugs/treatments/vaccines to treat its infection. As a result of the influx of clinical trials, researchers, clinicians, and the lay public, now more than ever, face a significant challenge in keeping up-to-date with the rapid rate of discoveries and advances. To remedy this problem, this research mined the ClinicalTrials.gov corpus to extract COVID-19 related clinical trials, produce unique reports to summarize findings and make the meta-data available via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Unique reports were created for each drug/intervention, Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) term, and Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) term. These reports, which have been run over multiple time points, along with APIs to access meta-data, are freely available at http://covidresearchtrials.com. The pipeline, reports, association of COVID-19 clinical trials with MeSH and HPO terms, insights, public repository, APIs, and correlations produced are all novel in this work. The freely available, novel resources present up-to-date relevant biological information and insights in a robust, accessible manner, illustrating their invaluable potential to aid researchers overcome COVID-19 and save hundreds of thousands of lives.
Highlights
Since the onset of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, researchers and clinicians have been swiftly conducting clinical trials to better understand the virus, its transmission, and potential drugs and vaccines to counter its rapid spread. Such COVID-19 related clinical trials can be found at ClinicalTrials.gov, a database for globally-conducted clinical trials run by the United States National Library of Medicine
Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO [3]): HPO is a standardized vocabulary of phenotype abnormalities that are seen in humans [3]
It is relevant to note that Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) and HPO ontologies were chosen over multiple alternative ontologies as these were compatible with the clinical trails XML format, enabling higher-level correlations across related genes, SNPs, protein mutations, and even clinical trials
Summary
Since the onset of the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, researchers and clinicians have been swiftly conducting clinical trials to better understand the virus, its transmission, and potential drugs and vaccines to counter its rapid spread. Such COVID-19 related clinical trials can be found at ClinicalTrials.gov, a database for globally-conducted clinical trials run by the United States National Library of Medicine. The number of COVID-19 related clinical trials is dramatically increasing: There were approximately 500 clinical trials in mid-late April, more than 1000 in early May, over 2000 in early June, and over 3000 in mid-July [1].
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