Enabling Tailored Therapeutics with Linked Data

Advances in the biological sciences are allowing pharmaceutical companies to meet the health care crisis with drugs that are more suitable for preventive and tailored treatment, thereby holding the promise of enabling more cost effective care with greater efficacy and reduced side effects. However, this shift in business model increases the need for companies to integrate data across drug discovery, drug development, and clinical practice. This is a fundamental shift from the approach of limiting integration activities to functional areas. The Linked Data approach holds much potential for enabling such connectivity between data silos, thereby enabling pharmaceutical companies to meet the urgent needs in society for more tailored health care. This paper examines the applicability and potential benefits of using Linked Data to connect drug and clinical trials related data sources and gives an overview of ongoing work within the W3C's Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group on publishing drug related data sets on the Web and interlinking them with existing Linked Data sources. A use case is provided that demonstrates the immediate benefit of this work in enabling data to be browsed from disease, to clinical trials, drugs, targets and companies.