Running ‘on-line’ classes to teach (and also assess) how

students can retrieve pertinent information on new drugs from

the World Wide Web

Bevyn Jarrott and Elizabeth Davis,Department of PharmacologyMonash University, Melbourne,

Australia

Modern Drug Development

(“better, faster, cheaper”)

3rd Year B.Sc. subjectConsists of 4 Units:

1. Drug Discovery

2. Modern drugs

3. Modern Preclinical Development

4. Clinical Development of drugs

One of the objectives of the subject (worth 10 % of

marks) is:

• To develop skills in obtaining, evaluating and using scientific information

• to deliver both a written report (= 7%) and a verbal report on new drugs (= 3%)

Practical session in the Modern Drugs Unit -

Internet searching on new drugs

• Each student uses an Internet connected computer in a 3 hour session

• Students are given one of 8 modern drugs to research

• Students search the WWW for information in a structured way using a proforma

Internet searching on new drugs

• Drugs are chosen that are generally still in Phase III

• Drugs chosen in 2001:Anakinra Etanercept Herceptin

Inhaled InsulinInfliximab Myocet PEG-Intron Zovant

• Best source of potential new drugs: www.newmedicines.org

www.newmedicines.org

Internet searching on new drugs

Drug being researched: ETANERCEPT (Enbrel)1. Manufacturer’s website: www.immunex.com

2. No. of websites found by Google = 5990

3. Most informative websites:

4. Best graphics website:

5. Site for clinical use:

6. Site describing drug’s pharmacokinetics:

7. Site describing drug’s Mechanism of action:

8. Sites describing present status as a drug:

9. Site discussing drug’s pharmacoeconomics:

Results with Google search engine

anakinra

anakinra

anakinra

enbrel

Protocol to compare inhaled Vs subcut

insulin

Response to inhaled insulin Vs subcut.

insulin

Results with Google search engine

SCIRUS - the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet

• Focuses only on web sites containing scientific content (~90 million web pages

• Delves deeper into Web sites by reading vital pdf and Postscript files

• ~1 million US patents

• Peer reviewed journal articles

• ~600K Beilstein abstracts

SCIRUS - in contrast to GOOGLE

• Filters out non-scientific sites• Finds peer-reviewed articles from

access-controlled databases with 17 million records such as Science Direct, BioMed Central, Ideal, Neuroscion.

• Searches and ranks by relevance (no. of words and no.of hyperlinks) or ranks by date

Search options – by disease, by drug name, by

drug company

Receive news on new drugs by e-mail

Sharing the results found ?

• The best report of each drug could be posted on the IUPHAR Website as:

New Drug of the Month an idea, proposed by Dr Ewen

MacDonald, University of Kuopio, an IUPHAR Teaching Section committee member.

• Independent refereeing of the report would be necessary