International Workshop on
Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies
VDOS-2014
Houston, TX Oct 7, 2014
in conjunction with the
5th International Conference on Biomedical Ontology
Drugs and vaccines have contributed to dramatic improvements in public health worldwide. Over the last decade, there have been efforts in the biomedical ontology community that represent various areas associated with drugs including vaccines that extend existing health and clinical terminology systems (e.g., SNOMED, RxNorm, NDF- RT, and MedDRA) and their applications to research and clinical data. This workshop will provide a platform for discussing innovative solutions as well as the challenges in the development and application of biomedical ontologies to representing and analyzing drugs and vaccines, their administration, immune responses induced, adverse events, and similar topics. The workshop will cover two main areas: (i) ontology representation of drugs (including vaccines), and (ii) applications of the ontologies in real world situations – administration, adverse events, etc. Examples of biomedical subject matter in the scope of this workshop: drug components (e.g., drug active ingredients, vaccine antigens, and adjuvants), administration details (e.g., dosage, administration route, and frequency), gene immune responses and pathways, drug-drug or drug-food interactions, and adverse events. Both research and clinical subjects will be covered. We will also focus on computational methods used to study these, for example, literature mining of vaccine/drug-gene interaction networks, meta-analysis of host immune responses, and time event analysis of the pharmacological effects.
Drugs and vaccines have been critical to prevent and treat human and animal diseases. Work in both (drugs and vaccines) areas is closely related - from preclinical research and development to manufacturing, clinical trials, government approval and regulation, and post-licensure usage surveillance and monitoring. In a broader scope, vaccine is a special type of drug. However, there are many differences between the two - for example, in case of vaccines, dose, time, route, and frequency of administration are generally known quite precisely. But this is not always the case in drugs. Since vaccines are often administered to healthy people to prevent disease, attribution of an adverse event following vaccination is less likely to be confounded by signs or symptoms of underlying disease. However, separation of manifestation of disease from manifestation of drug effect is often very challenging. In the U.S.A, vaccines are regulated under different laws by the Center for Biologics (CBER) at FDA, while drugs are regulated under the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act by the Center for Drugs (CDER) at FDA. Safety surveillance for vaccines is for the most part carried out by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, while for drugs it is carried out by the FDA. Due to these similarities and differences between vaccines and chemical drugs, a closer communication between these two areas is important to create effective ontological frameworks around which we can build comparative and predictive systems for both vaccines and drugs.
Although several related ontologies have been initiated with much progress made in the recent years, we still face many challenges in order to fully and logically represent drugs and vaccines, and efficiently use the ontologies. In the case of ontology representation, no consensuses have been achieved on how to ontologically represent many relevant areas, for example: (i) administration dose, route, and frequency, (ii) how to accurately represent adverse events, (iii) drug-drug interactions, drug-food interactions, etc (iv) experimental testing and analysis of vaccine/drug-induced immune responses, and (v) the complexity of time constraints for clinical events post vaccination or medication. Meanwhile, it is also a challenge to efficiently apply biomedical ontologies to solve research and clinical problems. For example, is there any advantage in applying ontologies for advanced literature mining in order to discover gene interaction networks underlying protective immunity or adverse events? How to apply ontologies for personalized medicine? How to use ontologies to improve the performance of complex vaccine/drug research and clinical data analysis? This workshop aims to bring together a diverse group of individuals from clinical, research and pharma-biotech areas to identify, propose, and discuss solutions for important research problems in the ontological representation of vaccine and drug information covering development and preparation, administration, mechanisms of action including induced host immune responses, adverse events, etc. This workshop is expected to support the deeper understanding of vaccine and drug mechanisms and effects. More specific topics will be selected based on attendees’ submissions and interests.
8:00 – 8:10 am Welcome Introduction
• Self-introductions of all attendees
• Cui Tao: briefly introduce the workshop schedule with any possible updates
8:10 - 9:05 am Session 1: Vaccine/drug related Ontology development and exploration
Chair: Cui Tao
• Rainer Winnenburg and Olivier Bodenreider. Exploring adverse drug events at the class level. (20 min, full paper)
• Muhammad Amith and Cui Tao. Towards the design of a vaccine information ontology for patient education. (20 min, full paper)
• Yongqun He, Sirarat Sarntivijai,Yu Lin, Rebecca Racz, Mei Li, Liwei Wang, Zuoshuang Xiang, Abra Guo, Shelley Zhang, Desikan Jagannathan, Luca Toldo, Cui Tao, Barry Smith. Updates on the development of the Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE) and its applications (15 min, short paper)
9:05 - 10:05 am Session 2: Interaction and network-related topics
Chair: Oliver He
• Lee Peters, Nathan Bahr and Olivier Bodenreider. Evaluating drug-drug interaction information in NDF-RT and DrugBank (20 min, full paper)
• Junguk Hur, Arzucan Ozgur, Zuoshuang Xiang and Yongqun He. Development and Application of an Interaction Network Ontology (INO) for Literature Mining of Vaccine-associated Gene-Gene Interactions (20 min, full paper)
• Yuji Zhang, Puqiang Wu, Yi Luo and Cui Tao. Network Analysis Identifies Sex-associated Patterns in VAERS RDF Graph. (20 min, full paper)
10:05 – 10:15 am Break
10:15 am – 11:00 noon Session 3: Keynote speech and discussion
Chair: Sivaram Arabandi
• Dr. Khalid F. Almoosa, Associate Professor of Medicine, Vice-Chair for Healthcare Quality, Dept. of Internal Medicine, UT Medical School; Director of Interprofessional Collaboration UT Health
11:00 am – 12:00 noon Session 4: General Discussion
Moderator: Sivaram Arabandi
Topic: Drug and vaccine ontology informatics
- OBO Foundry style AE ontologies (e.g., OAE and AERO) vs Non-OBO style ontologies (e.g., MedDRA and SNOMED)
- Ontology-based clinical and experimental data processing and analysis
- International community collaborations
- Have another workshop next year?
- Other open issues for discussion
The papers can be downloaded via: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/u003efvbtmdb3xi/AAA3id33zFwZJlvZLUGFGHXja?dl=0
Submission
For the paper submission, we will allow three submission formats:
full research papers (6 pages) format
work in progress / late breaking results (2-3 pages), and
a statement of interest (one page) for podium presentation.
The paper format will be the same as the format used in ICBO.
Templates can be found here.
All the papers will be submitted and handled through Easy Chair. https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vdos2014
After the full papers are accepted, we will work with the Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS) editors and reviewers to decide which papers will be formally invited for extension to be included in a thematic series in the JBMS journal. All full-length (6 pages) and short-length (2-3 pages) submissions will go through peer reviews by at least two reviewers. The one-page statement-of-interest submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organizers.
Individual Workshop Papers Due: Aug 15, 2014 (extended)
Notification of Acceptance: Aug 31, 2014
Camera Ready: Sep 15, 2014
First Revision due to JBMS: Dec 15, 2014
Vaccine and Drug Ontology in the Study of Mechanism and Effect" (VDOSME 2012)
International Workshop on Vaccine and Drug Ontology Studies (VDOS 2013)
Cui Tao, PhD School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas, Health Science Center at Houston
Yongqun “Oliver” He, DVM, PhD Department of Microbiology and Immunology Unit for Laboratory Animal Medicine Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics University of Michigan Medical School
Sivaram Arabandi, MD, MS Ontopro LLC Houston, TX