Nanoinformatics: a new area of research in nanomedicine

Abstract

Over a decade ago, nanotechnologists began research on applications of nanomaterials for medicine. This research has revealed a wide range of different challenges, as well as many opportunities. Some of these challenges are strongly related to informatics issues, dealing, for instance, with the management and integration of heterogeneous information, defining nomenclatures, taxonomies and classifications for various types of nanomaterials, and research on new modeling and simulation techniques for nanoparticles. Nanoinformatics has recently emerged in the USA and Europe to address these issues. In this paper, we present a review of nanoinformatics, describing its origins, the problems it addresses, areas of interest, and examples of current research initiatives and informatics resources. We suggest that nanoinformatics could accelerate research and development in nanomedicine, as has occurred in the past in other fields. For instance, biomedical informatics served as a fundamental catalyst for the Human Genome Project, and other genomic and -omics projects, as well as the translational efforts that link resulting molecular-level research to clinical problems and findings.

Using natural language processing techniques to inform research on nanotechnology

“…The Nanotoxicity Searcher is a tool to automatically annotate nanomedicine and nanotoxicology literature using pattern matching techniques [9,16,33]. The group used ABNER (available at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~bsettles/abner/), a biomedical named entity recognizer, to identify names of nanomaterials (NANO), potential routes of exposure (EXPO), target organs and/or organisms (TARGET), and types of toxicity/damage (TOXIC) [16,34].…”

Nanoinformatics: Emerging Databases and Available Tools

“…The major setback of the discipline of nanoinformatics is that it is still at an early stage of development and the data are scattered in the form of publications [13–15]. Recently, some initiatives have emerged in the field of nanoinformatics with respect to nanoparticle data management [16–19].…”

Nanoinformatics knowledge infrastructures: bringing efficient information management to nanomedical research

“…The novel discipline of nanoinformatics deals with all of these information challenges related to nanotechnology research and, specifically, with nanomedicine (Maojo et al 2012a). Several nanoinformatics initiatives are currently identifying data gaps and research priorities in the area and developing collaborative nanoinformatics environments where research institutions can publish descriptions of their data sources and make them publicly available over the Internet.…”