Towards a Consistent and Scientifically Accurate Drug Ontology.

Area of Science:

• Pharmacology and Medical Informatics
• Ontology Engineering
• Drug Discovery and Development

Background:

• Comparative effectiveness research necessitates a comprehensive drug ontology for querying National Drug Codes (NDCs).
• Existing drug terminologies and databases lack the required depth for detailed analysis of drug products.
• Current resources are insufficient for querying NDCs by active ingredient, mechanism of action, physiological effect, and therapeutic class.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel drug ontology (DrOn) to facilitate querying National Drug Codes (NDCs).
• To enable detailed analysis of drug products based on pharmacological and clinical characteristics.
• To support comparative effectiveness research through advanced drug information retrieval.

Main Methods:

• Conducted an ontological analysis of drugs from a realist perspective.
• Evaluated existing drug terminologies, ontologies, and databases technically and from a domain science viewpoint.
• Developed the Drug Ontology (DrOn) in Web Ontology Language (OWL).
• Populated DrOn with NDCs and RxNorm classes from National Library of Medicine content.
• Built an application utilizing DrOn and an OWL-based reasoner for querying NDCs.

Main Results:

• No existing drug ontology met the requirements for comparative effectiveness research.
• The developed Drug Ontology (DrOn) successfully integrates NDCs and RxNorm data.
• An application was created to query NDCs based on active ingredient, mechanism of action, physiological effect, and therapeutic class.
• The application leverages description logic for end-user query execution.

Conclusions:

• The Drug Ontology (DrOn) provides a robust solution for querying NDCs in comparative effectiveness research.
• DrOn overcomes limitations of existing drug terminologies by offering detailed, queryable drug information.
• The developed application and ontology are valuable resources for researchers in pharmacology and health informatics.