Vaccines and drugs have been critical to prevent and treat human and animal diseases. Vaccines and drugs are closely related in various aspects such as preclinical research and development, 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. Over the last decade, there have been efforts in biomedical ontology that represent various areas associated with vaccines and drugs, which join existing health and clinical terminology systems (e.g., SNOMED, RxNorm, NDF-RT, and MedDRA) in their applications to research and clinical data. This thematic series aims to provide a platform for discussing problems and solutions in the development and applications of biomedical ontologies to representing and analyzing vaccines/drugs, vaccine/drug administrations, vaccine/drug-induced immune responses, adverse events, and similar topics. Different computational methods, including literature mining of vaccine/drug-gene interaction networks, meta-analysis of host immune responses, time event analysis of adverse events, and Semantic Web applications, have been applied.
Prof Darrell Abernethy, Dr Gully Burns, Dr Yongqun He, Dr Cui Tao, Dr Luca Toldo