Patients at the Heart of the Scientific Dialogue: An Industry Perspective.

Pharmaceutical companies need to regularly communicate to patients all essential information about their medicines, especially data from the research studies that were conducted to evaluate the medicine's benefits and risks. To do that, companies will need to make sure patients have access to and awareness of relevant information. This can be achieved by ensuring medical information is freely available to the reader, and working with publishers to facilitate open access (free) publications. Companies should also help improve patients' understanding of medical terminology, offer simplified versions of scientific content, and deliver information through various formats (print versus digital, text versus audio versus video) to address different learning styles and literacy levels. This will empower patients with knowledge and improve shared decision-making. It will also be essential for pharmaceutical companies to involve patients in various stages of medicine development, such as getting their input on how the research studies for investigating these medicines are designed and reported to ensure relevant information to patients are well-captured and clear. This should also go in parallel with providing opportunities to elevate the patient voice through patient-partnered research and authorship on topics particularly relevant to them.

Improving access to oncology publications for advocates and people with cancer.

Journal articles provide reliable and current information about cancer research. This can offer hope to people with cancer and help them make decisions about their care. Here, the authors suggest ways in which different groups may help people with cancer to find, view, and understand articles. For example, journals should make articles free to view if they describe research that could change patient care. Also, clear titles and easy-to-follow summaries or videos may help people to find relevant articles and understand the main findings. It is important to explore ways to best share research with all those whose lives it may affect.

Identifying and Validating Networks of Oncology Biomarkers Mined From the Scientific Literature.

Biomarkers, as measurements of defined biological characteristics, can play a pivotal role in estimations of disease risk, early detection, differential diagnosis, assessment of disease progression and outcomes prediction. Studies of cancer biomarkers are published daily; some are well characterized, while others are of growing interest. Managing this flow of information is challenging for scientists and clinicians. We sought to develop a novel text-mining method employing biomarker co-occurrence processing applied to a deeply indexed full-text database to generate time-interval-delimited biomarker co-occurrence networks. Biomarkers across 6 cancer sites and a cancer-agnostic network were successfully characterized in terms of their emergence in the published literature and the context in which they are described. Our approach, which enables us to find publications based on biomarker relationships, identified biomarker relationships not known to existing interaction networks. This search method finds relevant literature that could be missed with keyword searches, even if full text is available. It enables users to extract relevant biological information and may provide new biological insights that could not be achieved by individual review of papers.