Abstract

BackgroundDrug development is a billion dollar business globally. It is crucial to stay up to date on drug developments all over the world any repetition will be irreversible waste of resources. The only way to keep up with all the development is to keep a living database of all trials running for each condition and covering all studies from every country in any language. An Information Specialist collects and classifies all pharmacological interventions from all schizophrenia trials.MethodsCochrane Schizophrenia’s Study-Based Register was developed and used as the source of trials, Emtree and MeSH for synonyms, AdisInsight and CT.gov for research drugs and WHO ATC for marketed drugs. This research took four years from 17 December 2014 and 6 January 2019 and involved 18,500 randomized controlled trial from 90 countries in 23 languages.ResultsOne third of tested interventions on patients with schizophrenia are pharmacological (816; belonging to 106 clinical classes) with antipsychotic drugs being the most researched (15.1%). Only 528 of these medications are listed in WHO ATC. Around one third of these drug interventions are seen only in research (236; from 21 pharmacological/biochemical classes). Within the pharmacological evaluations we identified 28 ‘qualifiers’ including dose, route, and timing of drug delivery. Using Data Science approaches, this research revealed unique antipsychotic drugs that are being prescribed only in certain countries such as Japan but the West is not aware of them. This research is also revealed all the research drugs and current trends in developing drugs in pharmaceutical companies.DiscussionClassification of medication interventions from trials requires use of many sources of information none of which are inclusive of all drugs. Without a global search in all languages the pharmaceutical companies and researchers are missing important successful developments from non-English speaking world. The cycle of developing research/withdrawn drugs does not stop and may end in veterinary medicine, doping agents in sports, and illicit drug market.

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