Quertle
AI-based Analytics for Biomedical Literature Discovery

Jeffrey Saffer, President and CEO of Quertle, and Vicki Burnett, Co-founder and COO of Quertle, working in the field of biomedical literature for many years, realized its importance in the pharmaceutical industry, as it is the cornerstone for discovery, publication planning, competitive intelligence, identification of adverse events, compliance, and more. “Despite being so essential for the industry, the methods for discovering critical information from the literature is more than a frustration,” begins Saffer. “A European Patent Office study illustrates that up to 30 percent of R&D money is wasted rediscovering existing information.” He also adds that according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the leading causes for grant proposal failure is proposing work that is not actually new. More advanced methods are required to find value in the overwhelming tsunami of biomedical information, since newer approaches, such as semantics and natural language processing (NLP) have not lived up to expectations.

“Gone are the days when a search of PubMed or related resources can alone be considered sufficient for multi-million dollar endeavors. Now the entire mindset regarding the biomedical literature requires a shift toward a big data mentality—where artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with visual analytics can address this effectively,” adds Saffer. Henderson, NV based Quertle–a biomedical big data analytics company, integrates artificial intelligence and other modern technologies into its platform to gain actionable insights from biomedical and biological content. Quertle leads the transition from search to AI-powered visual analytic-based discovery via a BioAI platform—enabling researchers to unearth relevant information from the thicket of journal articles, patents, NIH grant applications, and other documents that make up the scientific record. The platform minimizes the risk of missing critical documents, providing an important resource for companies, university researchers, and healthcare providers.

With AI underpinnings, the firm’s flagship product Qinsight provides actionable insights from the biomedical and life science literature to impact lives and healthcare for the future generations.

We provide actionable insights from the biomedical and life science literature by combining artificial intelligence-based discovery, along with intuitive visual analytics

The concept-based visual analytics in Qinsight provides summarization, discovers emerging trends and uncovers hidden connections to enable high-efficiency discovery for making strategic research decisions.

“Another unique capability in Qinsight is the AI-powered identification of high relevance and high precision concepts related to the user’s query; instead of long lists with many, and often overwhelming, irrelevant results,” adds Saffer. He points out an example, where particular users are interested in a disease, and then want to find the specific genes involved. With their unique discovery engine—including Power Term queries, Quertle provides users the entire classes of related concepts such as "genes", and automatic identification of key concepts within the relevant literature, as well as an intuitive way to explore it. Related to the query, the list of genes associated with the disease–in Saffer’s example, will be displayed in the Key Concepts filter area, in just a fraction of a second, without the user needing to do perhaps thousands of separate queries. Since AI is the future, subsequent plans are towards understanding and assisting the organizations that really fail to realize how inefficient their current search engine really is.

In addition, Quertle offers an API for its partners to access the advanced functionality of the biomedical search engine. Quertle will work with developers to customize this tool to integrate the API into their applications, enabling their users to directly do research from within their existing applications—saving researcher’s time and minimizing the risk of overlooking critical information. Forging ahead, the firm is planning to bring in partnerships in 2017 with leading content providers to enable high-efficiency discovery and insight for biomedical literature.