Indication Finding: a novel use case for representation learning
This addresses the challenge of drug repurposing for pharmaceutical researchers, though it appears incremental as it applies existing NLP methods to a new biomedical domain.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying new therapeutic uses for existing drugs by using representation learning to generate embeddings of diseases and prioritizing them based on proximity to well-supported indications, demonstrating success with anti-IL-17A therapy.
Many therapies are effective in treating multiple diseases. We present an approach that leverages methods developed in natural language processing and real-world data to prioritize potential, new indications for a mechanism of action (MoA). We specifically use representation learning to generate embeddings of indications and prioritize them based on their proximity to the indications with the strongest available evidence for the MoA. We demonstrate the successful deployment of our approach for anti-IL-17A using embeddings generated with SPPMI and present an evaluation framework to determine the quality of indication finding results and the derived embeddings.