Qibitz: Mining PubMed for Repurposable Drugs

PubMed's current search interface makes it tedious to systematically search for medical and research literature on drugs that could potentially be used to treat a given pathology, including patients with genetically altered tumors. This is because physicians must search separately for each drug-pathology combination (or drug-gene combination). To streamline this process, this paper proposes adding a faceted search interface to PubMed. Faceted search is a common feature on e-commerce websites that allows users to filter search results by selecting different fields. By incorporating this technology, not only can physicians save time and improve the accuracy of their literature searches, but also presenting search results in this way makes patterns emerge, which can suggest new treatment options for a given pathology (including patients with genetically altered tumors).