Intelligent User Interface for Decision Support in Drug Development

Drug development is a complicated, costly, and lengthy process spanning multiple stages, which each may take multiple years. Only a few drugs reach or pass the clinical trial stage because high failure rates are common in the pharmaceutical industry. This work has been carried out in an applied research setting. Funded by industry, the work has strong requirements to develop working prototypes alongside scientists from the industry that guided the process. The goal of this project is to investigate support tools with computer intelligence methods that enable to shorten the amount of time needed during the pre-clinical stages of drug development and to reduce the associated experiment costs. As the result, three prototypes are developed addressing diverse requirements that arise at different stages of drug development in different units of an organization. To this end, three promising sub-problems were identified in a combined effort with industry experts: Drug formulation, Solvent selection, and Bio pharmaceutical literature research. For each task an interactive tool is proposed which includes novel intelligent visualizations designed to directly or indirectly reduce the amount of time invested in the associated tasks. Each tool has been developed in close cooperation with industry experts over the last three years. The connection between these prototypes is the interactive presentation of information derived from a computer-based intelligent process The next steps of the Ph.D. project are to assess the usability and effectiveness of each tool.