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Sunday, January 11, 2015

Tuberculosis and the Global Clinical Study Map using Clinical Trials data from Web .

People around the world through blogs , newsletters and other forms of media showing how deadly diseases like TB are spreading and killing people. Between last 2-3 years lot of people have come up with ideas like open source development in drugs , lot of consortium have been formed to move with the research. With a bit of data mining on the clinical trial data we can easily see whats going on with the drug discovery arena . Using some r libraries we can easily access the clinical trial data from clinicaltrail.gov website and parse the xml files . I searched for "tuberculosis" with the start date and 1/1/2013 and end date 12/31/2014 and the trials with a "closed" status including all the age groups. After looking at this map I would ask the Indian Health ministry, Is India waiting for the west to develop its drugs or it does want the people to die of this lethal disease ? Only 3 clinical trails are being done but none of them are Phase I-IV trails for new drugs. Is the scientific community just abandon their hands on this ? In USA two medical centers(Lincoln and cleveland) already seem to be working on the new drugs, one is bedaquiline (NCT02216331) and other SQ109(NCT01874314). I didn't look on European centers and Africa. The code for this available @ git . I used rMaps library with Leaflet.js library. One can play with any disease and with different start and end date and with trial status. The Map below (2013-14) is iframe embedded on html which is done using the command using rMaps package -

map$show('iframesrc',cdn=TRUE)

I found some issues with with the geocode function from the ggmap package takes a lot of time to access the google api for latitude and longitude . If anyone has a faster way to get those let me know.

The first maps shows the clinical trials from 2009-2014 which designates a lot of Trials being done on TB in India . But from 2013-14 no further interest was made on TB .    


Map from 2013 -14







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