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A leading proteomics driven drug discovery company from North America
Customer has engaged Molecular Connections to provide comprehensive protein target profile information extracted and analyzed from literature and other public data sources
Challenge faced by Customer's scientists
Customer leverages its unique target identification and validation platforms initially to identify targets, which will used by their collaborator to develop therapeutic antibodies.
As a part of this effort the scientific team at Customer has come up with a set of targets that needed to be prioritized further based on the existing knowledge on these targets. This task of studying and creating a comprehensive information repository from all public information (published literature and public databases) about protein targets of their interest was entrusted to MC. The main areas of interest for each target were:
- Expression
- Antibody information
- Molecular description
- Disease
- Protein interactions
Solution Implemented by Molecular Connections
MC put together a team of curators (MS in Microbiology and related fields) and quality assurance officers (Ph.D. in Microbiology and related fields) to build the information repository for customers. As a first step, this team built a proto-type to enable customer's scientific team to determine the project scope and visualization requirements. This included standardization of fields for data capture as well as developing a display format for visualizing and analysis of interaction, expression, antibody, disease and molecular description information for the targets of interest.
Based on the feedback received from the customer on the proto-type, Molecular Connections developed a customized Protein Target Profile Database (PTDB) to enable scientists at Customerto view, retrieve and analyze relevant information on a target in a seamless fashion. PTDB's content has been built using Molecular Connections' proprietary high-throughput information extraction tools. Specific queries were standardized to retrieve articles related to interactions, expression, antibody and other related information in a comprehensive yet specific manner. These queries were individually uploaded in to the in-house down load system for retrieval of relevant documents for processing.
The curation team used standard operating procedures (laid out in a comprehensive curation manual developed at MC) while curating the selected documents to ensure standardization and uniformity in the data collection process. An exhaustive set of controlled vocabulary was derived to ensure uniformity in data entry across curators. This was followed by validation and quality check where in all the interactions were cross checked by the senior scientists (quality assurance team) to minimize the errors. This senior scientists used an internal proprietary validation tool to ensure scientific accuracy and uniformity of the information captured.
Value Derived by the customer
The customized protein target profile database has already shown substantial utility to the customer's scientific team by saving substantial time and resources that would have been otherwise spent in literature research and data collection..
Present Status
Molecular Connections continues to add information about additional protein targets which customer's scientists are interested to study and also periodically update the information about the protein targets already present in database.
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