MILAN – A medical information-system linking agents to metabolic networks

Summary

The genome, the protein-biosynthesis and the metabolism constitute a complex, strongly linked system. The complete functionality of this system is not entirely understood yet. Especially pharmacologists and medical doctors are interested to know how the system works regarding the influence of medications (Drug-Pointing). In the last thirty years biochemical research delivered a huge amount of relevant data for this field. The problem is, that all this data is highly distributed in thousands of databases which are just partly interconnected. Gathering and interconnecting this large amount of distributed data by hand significantly slows down the research process. Hence it is vitally important to create tools in terms of information-systems, which support the process of understanding through automatic data-integration and analysis. In this paper we would like to introduce our approach of a corresponding information-system. MILAN is an extensible datawarehouse framework, which has already integrated about 7.7 million medical publication-abstracts as well as metabolic pathways and information about enzymes, ligands, agents and pharmaceuticals from a collection of major biochemical databases. The system provides a set of functionalities to show where the metabolism is affected by a certain drug and instantly displays the most relevant publications for the particular case. Future development will focus on the integration of more databases and the development of additional functions like detection of side-effects and drug-interactions.