MedMiner: An Internet text-mining tool for biomedical information, with application to gene expression profiling

The trend toward high-throughput techniques in molecular biology and the ex plosion of online scientific data threaten to overwhelm the ability of rese archers to take full advantage of available information. This problem is pa rticularly severe in the rapidly expanding al ea of gene expression experim ents, Sol example, those carried our with cDNA microarrays or oligonucleoti de chips. We present an Internet-based hypertext program, MedMiner; which f ilters and organizes large amounts of textual and structured information re turned from public search engines like GeneCards and PubMed We demonstrate the value of the approach for the analysts of gene expression data, but Med Miner can also be extended to other areas involving molecular genetic or ph armacological information. More generally still, MedMiner can be used to or ganize the information returned from any arbitrary PubMed search.