GlaxoSmithKline Japan Selects SciBite Semantic Platform to Enhance Pharmacovigilance Capabilities

TOKYO and CAMBRIDGE, England, August 31, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

SciBite - The award-winning semantic analytics company, today announced that GlaxoSmithKline K.K. (hereinafter referred to as GSK Japan), one of Japan's leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies, has selected SciBite's Semantic Platform to enhance pharmacovigilance capabilities and deliver on its commitment to improve the quality of human life. TERMite, SciBite's semantic named entity recognition (NER) and extraction engine, is currently being implemented to reduce the duration and enhance the certainty involved in constantly evaluating the vast body of English language research produced worldwide for potential safety information.  

Prior to selecting SciBite's Semantic Platform, GSK Japan initiated a Proof of Concept in order to assess whether the technology had the potential to complement a part of current manual pharmacovigilance processes used in Japan. To kick-start the project, the team created a custom-built thesaurus of GSK drug terms (or VOCab). Additionally, the pharmaceutical giant made use of SciBite's TERMite Expressions (TExpress) module to search for phrases within texts suggestive of pharmacovigilance events. TExpress patterns were grouped together into subject-specific sets enabling the software to annotate sentences with category labels based on the phrases and keywords used. Following the annotation process, a bespoke novel ranking algorithm was employed to determine the overall importance of each article to GSK pharmacovigilance activities in Japan.

The power of the solution to provide huge advantages to GSK Japan in terms of process assurance and duration became apparent extremely quickly.  The result of the Proof of Concept was an ultra-fast processing period, providing accurate identification of all articles requiring reporting.

"SciBite is absolutely committed to our Japanese clients and is extremely pleased to welcome GSK Japan to our international group of customers," said Rob Greenwood, Chief Executive Officer, SciBite. "Our highly flexible technologies are proven by life science companies the world over to offer new, innovative opportunities to change the way they achieve their pharmacovigilance activities. We look forward to seeing how GSK Japan combine our market-leading technology and their internal human-centric expertise to evolve their pharmacovigilance capabilities."

About SciBite 

SciBite is a leading provider of semantic solutions for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries.  Headquartered in the UK, it supports its global customer base with offices in both Cambridge UK & US and in Tokyo, Japan. SciBite's semantic software suite includes TERMite, VOCabs, TExpress, DOCstore and SciNav.

To learn more about SciBite and its solutions please contact us at info@scibite.com or visit our website at http://www.scibite.com

Contact (English)
Monica Kulkarni
Marketing Manager
SciBite Ltd.
+44-7740268926  
monica@scibite.com

Contact (Japanese & English)
John Bolger
General Manager Japan
Marunouchi Trust Tower 20F, 1-8-3 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-Ku, Tokyo
+81-3-5288-5537
john@scibite.com

NOTE:  SciBite, TERMite, VOCabs, TExpress, DOCstore and SciNav, and the SciBite logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of SciBite Ltd.