Edited by: Yongqun Oliver He, Cui Tao and Junguk Hur
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 represents various areas associated with drugs including vaccines that extend existing health and clinical terminology systems (e.g., SNOMED, RxNorm, NDF- RT, and MedDRA), vernacular medical terminologies, ontologies (e.g., Drug Ontology, Vaccine Ontology, and Ontology of Adverse Events), and their applications to research and clinical data. This thematic series provides 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 thematic series 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, a meta-analysis of host immune responses, and time event analysis of the pharmacological effects.