I cannot seem to make sense of the indications that are approved for particular drugs (cancer drugs in particular). It seems you now define “approved indication” when an indication is listed for the drug in a clinical trial with a maximum phase of IV. I reckoned this is the strategy, since this is in line with what is stated at the top Description paragraph of the Profile tab for a given drug.
A couple of examples that shows the lack of approved indications:
Ipilimumab - a well-known immune checkpoint inhibitor that is now approved for multiple cancer types. However, in the Open Targets Platform Portal, it seems this drug is only approved for Melanoma.
Olaparib - a well-known PARP inhibitor is now approved for multiple tumor types. According to data from the Open Targets Platform, only ovarian cancer seems to be the approved (tumor-type specific) indication.
Unless I am interpreting the indication data in in unintended manner, I think these aspects are fairly important elements to improve/rectify in future releases.
Thank you for alerting us to missing indications in our drug index.
The data we use to power our drug index is provided by our colleagues at ChEMBL. They integrate drug and indication data from a number of sources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, ATC, DailyMed, and FDA.
If there are missing indications for a specific drug, please contact the ChEMBL team at chembl-help@ebi.ac.uk. They can then update their database and when we process their latest release, it will update our drug index too.
Just out of curiosity, are there other research tools and platforms that you use to find drug indications? I am always interested to learn about the other tools our users rely on and will explore if we can potentially integrate their data.
Got it! I might approach ChEMBL with the observation. The thing is that the indications listed are all valid, it just seems to be a lag with respect to what is recorded in ChEMBL’s database and the continuous updates/additions of indications for different cancer drugs (i.e. by the FDA). With respect to other platforms, I have looked quite a bit, but I find that your platform is by far the strongest one, both with respect to structure, ease-of-use, and also up-to-date data for various knowledge sources. Some of the other larger drug databases (DrugBank, DrugCentral) are either missing this info or is not as comprehensive as I was hoping for. I’ll dig further to see whether any other tools/sources might be beneficial for your data integration routines.
I have now approached ChEMBL with the matter, since this is your primary source.
For cancers, it seems like there are a number of currently approved indications which are still missing in OT. Consider e.g. an immunotherapy drug like Nivolumab, which is now approved (frequently considering other criteria as well, e.g. presence of biomarkers, previous treatments etc.) for several tumor types:
Using the Open Targets platform, i cannot see that this is approved for colorectal cancers, head and neck, or mesothelioma. It seems like there are still some rooms for improving this part. I am not really sure what is the best way to improve upon the matter, but I think awareness of the issue is warranted.
thank you for reporting this problem. We have documented the issue you reported, and the actions needed to reduce this mismatch you are observing. Please refer to our issue here:
We meet with ChEMBL regularly, so hopefully we’ll be able to provide detailed updates soon.
our colleagues at ChEMBL have explored including EMA’s public assessment reports spreadsheets to maintain a high quality list of approved indications. For the case of Nivolumab, they could reproduce all 13 indications reported in Dailymed, so we think this will greatly help fill the gap of missing indications. 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.
Regarding Drugbank, this is a great resource that is free-to-access but unfortunately the use of their data requires a license.
