Autonomy for Pharmaceuticals

IDOL enables the extraction of meaning from the complex terminology prevalent in a pharmaceutical company's knowledge base of information, expertise and experience. IDOL understands the conceptual meanings of words rather than just matching keywords. For example, when a researcher does a search on amoxicillin, IDOL can bring up not just synonyms of the drug amoxicillin but also the family that amoxicillin belongs to, the beta-lactams.

IDOL supports about 1,000 file formats, be it text, video or audio, and virtually every content repository including the document management systems most prevalent in the pharmaceutical industry such as OpenText, FileNet and Documentum.

IDOL automatically allows researchers and scientists to a range of pertinent documents, services and tools that are contextually linked to the original text. For example, a researcher searching on Pfizer's drug Viagra will be automatically linked to other content relating to Pfizer (eg. other drugs) or blindness (one of the supposed side effects of Viagra).

One of the biggest challenges in the pharmaceutical world is that keyword searches bring back too many results that need to be sorted manually before they can be used. IDOL's Automatic Query Guidance technology automatically guides keyword-oriented users to the exact information they are looking for. A list of queries are presented to the user based on different contexts and the user can now guide the engine simply by clicking on the context that most applies to the subject they are researching. IDOL then automatically re-queries, adding this new-found context and, if required, suggests further sub-contexts within which the new query may be found. An example of this in the pharmaceutical world is the search for CAT. Automatic Query Guidance will bring up a list of queries such as CAT (feline); CAT (Caterpillar, Inc.), CAT (gene); CAT (Center for Alternate Technology), etc. The researcher can then use the CAT that is most suited to the initial search.

IDOL Clustering organizes massive amounts of unstructured content into logical and easy to manage list of hot or breaking topics for scientists who may be looking for particular trends in their data such as the breakout of SARS in a new country or patients who are experiencing a side effect from using a particular drug.

IDOL automatically assists the rationalization of content to minimize the waste caused by the duplication of storage and effort. One of the core operations of IDOL is the ability to conceptually rate the similarity of two or more documents. Hence when content is created or indexed Autonomy automatically detects whether this specific piece of information already exists in the system and can trigger the appropriate action. What frequently occurs in the pharmaceutical industry is that scientists who cannot locate the experiment information they are looking for repeat the experiment. This is a significant productivity drain. In the pharmaceutical world, time to market is key. Even small gains of 1% or 2% translates into a drug appearing many weeks or even months ahead of traditional schedules. IDOL improves efficiency and reduces costs by its ability to detect whether a specific piece of information related to an experiment already exists in the system, helping eliminate costly duplication of research and giving pharmaceuticals that gain in time. In addition, IDOL helps pharmaceuticals with records retention, a huge challenge gripping this industry today.