Literature-related discovery (LRD): Potential treatments for Parkinson's disease

Literature-Related Discovery (LRD) is the linking of two or more literature concepts that have heretofore not been linked (i.e., disjoint), in order to produce novel, interesting, plausible, and intelligible knowledge (i.e., potential discovery). The open discovery systems (ODS) component of LRD starts with a problem to be solved, and generates solutions to that problem through potential discovery. We have been using ODS LRD to identify potential treatments or preventative actions for challenging medical problems, among myriad other applications. The previous two papers in this Special Issue describe the application of ODS LRD to Raynaud's Phenomenon (RP) and to cataracts. Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, affecting approximately 1% of individuals older than 60 years, and is characterized by resting tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia, and postural instability. We selected the subject of PD because of its global prevalence, and its apparent intractability to all treatments except for palliative remediation mainly through drugs or surgery. Our first goal was to identify non-drug non-surgical treatments that would 1) prevent the occurrence, or 2) reduce the progression rate, or 3) stop the progression, or 4) maybe even reverse the progression, of PD. Our second goal was to demonstrate that we could again solve an ODS problem (using LRD) with no prior knowledge of any results or prior work (unlike the case of the RP problem). As in the 'cataract' example, we used the MeSH taxonomy of MEDLINE to restrict potential discoveries to selected semantic classes, and to identify potential discoveries efficiently. Our third goal was to generate large amounts of potential discovery in more than an order of magnitude less time than required for the RP study. The discovery generation methodology has been developed to the point where ODS LRD problems can be solved with no results or know,ledge of any prior work. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.