About MeTeOR

Literature mining and automated hypothesis-generation with MeTeOR

What is MeTeOR?

MeTeOR, or the MeSH Term Objective Reasoning network, is a network representation of genes, drugs, and diseases built on MeSH terms curated by the National Library of Medicine.

Why Do I Care?

The scientific literature is vast, and valuable information connecting findings from disparate works is easily missed. Teams of collaborators address this problem up to a point but could still benefit from systematic “big data” approaches that mine the entire literature to generate testable hypotheses on a large scale.

How Does MeTeOR Solve this Problem?

MeTeOR mines the PubMed literature, revealing knowledge previously hidden in a sea of information. Given one biological entity (a gene, drug, or disease), it can give a ranked list of associations with other biological entities, and it can highlight papers pertaining to any two biological entities.

How Reliable is It?

MeTeOR tallies more associations among genes, drugs and diseases than reference databases and is more reliable than existing natural language processing algorithms in prioritizing known associations. In retrospective tests using literature from before 2014, MeTeOR predicted relationships that were only described in the subsequent literature from 2014-2016, and in a prospective example, it predicted novel Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) associations, most notably an unsuspected direct interaction with CDK2, which we validated experimentally.

How Should MeTeOR Be Used?

We have an example of how MeTeOR can be used.

For feedback, suggestions, or for error/bug reports please contact us at lichtargelab@gmail.com.

MeTeOR is intended for educational and research purposes only; we do not support the use of MeTeOR as a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. See FAQs for details about commercial use.