Theragenomic knowledge management for individualised safety of drugs, chemicals, pollutants and dietary ingredients

Abstract

Severe adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a major problem in drug development and clinical practice and the most common cause of market withdrawals of drugs. Individualised drug safety aims at the prospective identification of single patients who carry genetic predispositions for the development of serious or fatal ADRs under drug treatment. For a comprehensive individualised drug safety evaluation a clearly structured organisation, linkage and representation of diverse and heterogeneous, yet related, knowledge is imperative. To efficiently support experts in this process a platform, coined OKAPI, was specified that combines multiple concepts in knowledge management to perform ontological knowledge acquisition, processing and integration. SafeBaseTM (TheraSTrat) is an ontology driven implementation of the OKAPI specification and an innovative, user-friendly and interactive platform for storage, management and visualisation of knowledge across multiple scientific disciplines pertinent to current and future theragenomics-based drug discovery and development and to strategies of individualised drug safety.