Machine learning approach to identify adverse events in scientific biomedical literature.

Monitoring the occurrence of adverse events in the scientific literature is a mandatory process in drug marketing surveillance. This is a very time-consuming and complex task to fulfill the compliance and, most importantly, to ensure patient safety. Therefore, a machine learning (ML) algorithm has been trained to support this manual intellectual review process, by automatically providing a classification of the literature articles into two types. An algorithm has been designed to automatically classify "relevant articles" which are reporting any kind of drug safety relevant information, and those which are not reporting an adverse drug reaction as "not relevant." The review process is consisted of many rules and aspects which needed to be taken into consideration. Therefore, for the training of the algorithm, thousands of documents from previous screenings have been used. After several iterations of adjustments and fine tuning, the ML approach is definitively a great achievement in pre-sorting the articles into "relevant" and "non-relevant" and supporting the intellectual review process.

Olfaction in three genetic and two MPTP-induced Parkinson's disease mouse models.

Various genetic or toxin-induced mouse models are frequently used for investigation of early PD pathology. Although olfactory impairment is known to precede motor symptoms by years, it is not known whether it is caused by impairments in the brain, the olfactory epithelium, or both. In this study, we investigated the olfactory function in three genetic Parkinson's disease (PD) mouse models and mice treated with MPTP intraperitoneally and intranasally. To investigate olfactory function, we performed electro-olfactogram recordings (EOGs) and an olfactory behavior test (cookie-finding test). We show that neither a parkin knockout mouse strain, nor intraperitoneal MPTP treated animals display any olfactory impairment in EOG recordings and the applied behavior test. We also found no difference in the responses of the olfactory epithelium to odorants in a mouse strain over-expressing doubly mutated α-synuclein, while this mouse strain was not suitable to test olfaction in a cookie-finding test as it displays a mobility impairment. A transgenic mouse expressing mutated α-synuclein in dopaminergic neurons performed equal to control animals in the cookie-finding test. Further we show that intranasal MPTP application can cause functional damage of the olfactory epithelium.