Mr. Wessam Sonbol is the CEO and co-founder of Delve Health, the maker of Perta a robust and comprehensive data mining solution focused on life science research industry, featuring an unmatched data collection of global clinical trials, clinical trial investigator profiles, publications and drug development pipelines. Learn more about Delve Health.
Q: PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov are used extensively in the biomedical community. What are the gaps you see with these databases?
A: Based on PubMed’s own statistics, only 5% of researchers get to their relevant data in three or less queries, as far as the 95% of researchers, they performs ten of more queries to get their relevant data. This is a lot of wasted time. On ClinicalTrials.gov, only 3% of trials are actually registered, that’s a huge gap in the foundation that supports medical and scientific progress. As mentioned on Deborah Zarin, Director of clinicaltrials.gov interview on Bio-IT World.
Q: What benefits does Delve Health offer to academic researchers?
A: An affordable solution to help get the most relevant information across multiple sources, connecting data from publications to clinical trials. Saving them time in research and let them focus more on the actionable results. In addition, researchers can easily review, document, grade and save their review and have it available for download in a nicely formatted excel document. Using Delve Health, a team of researchers can easily collaborate, and share their activities with each other. In addition, our services include quite a bit of additional free-text articles.
Q: What are the advantages of Delve Health’s programs for biomedical industry professionals?
A: Really same as for academia – our message is the same. We help users get the most relevant information faster. Users can easily sift through all their outputs in one page. In addition, users can save their searches, and share them with their colleagues. So rather than copy/paste data into excel spreadsheets, then email them – you can now just save and share it with anyone else that is within your Team/Organization. What also benefits the biomedical more, our solutions allow users to understand the competitive market faster, by quickly listing all the organizations working on the same subject.
Q: Who do you think would benefit the most from Delve Health’s services?
A: Biomedical Researchers, and scientists, and medical Students.
Q: What are the limitations of your current offerings?
A: Data sources, we’re actively looking to add more data source. Also improving our natural language processing capabilities is an ongoing task, the more people search on our platform, the more efficient it becomes.
Q: How can somebody check out your services? Do you offer a free trial?
A: Our tools are subscription based. It costs $40/mo for academic users and about $180/mo for corp. Users can definitely try it out – simply just go to our website and click on a link to try it for free.
Q: How do you see publication and clinical trial data intelligence evolving over the next 10 years? What do you think will be the biggest opportunities and challenges?
A: The amount of data will continue on increasing. If we look at PubMed alone, we are at about 10,000 citations a year now, clinical trials are increasing every year and more organizations are allowing for data sharing, which means that more data will be available for researchers to use. This all means that the struggle for mapping the data across various sources will only go up from here. The challenge will be to keep up with the information we are getting daily and ensure that researchers, scientists and doctors have the latest information.
If you have developed or use a tool that you believe adds great value to the biomedical community, email me at info(at)accessbiomedsolutions.com to get it highlighted on the blog.
