Incomplete clinical precedence for Nivolumab

[ireneisdoomed]

An user from Community has reported that Nivolumab has missing approved indications compared to the information in Dailymed. Specifically, we only cover 4 of the 13 references we could be extracting from Dailymed.

Observed behaviour

We collate information about clinical precedence through ChEMBL from 2 main sources:

• Clinical Trials. Reporting information for drugs across any phase of the clinical development
• Dailymed. Reporting information only for approved drugs

We have an asynchronism between the data we have, and what is reported in Dailymed. Specifically, the user is reporting that Nivolumab has been approved for colorectal cancers, head and neck, or mesothelioma, however we only display information for these indications up to the phase III CT.

This mismatch is very likely to be happening for other drugs.

Expected behaviour

Dailymed's nivolumab label information indeed collects this information. The dataset of indications is the combination of manual curation and an automated pipeline that extracts drug indications from Dailymed. We want to automatically parse Dailymed regularly to bring the mismatch between Dailymed and Open Targets to a minimum.

Tasks

• [ ] Measure the extent of the problem.
• [ ] Discuss with ChEMBL the steps needed to regularly run the automated pipeline to have an up to date version of the indications
• ... Is there anything else we could be doing?

Acceptance tests

How do we know the task is complete?

1. Data: When I inspect the indications dataset and filter for CHEMBL2108738, I see that EFO_0000181, EFO_0000182, MONDO_0007576, EFO_1001480, MONDO_0001056, EFO_0000478, EFO_0008528, EFO_0000770 have been added to the approvedIndications array.

[ireneisdoomed]

An update on the situation after the meeting with ChEMBL on 28/09:

• Dailymed automatic pipeline is not production ready. The primary challenge revolves around the grounding of entities (both drug and indication).

• Potential Solution with EMA’s public assessment reports. This seems promising because for drugs like Nivolumab, they've successfully identified all 13 indications that are reported in Dailymed. This will greatly help fill the gap of missing indications with a high quality resource. However, it is also important to note that there might be discrepancies between approvals from FDA (as reported in Dailymed) and the EMA. We expect to see this take effect in the next ChEMBL 34 release.