What are chemists and biologists doing at EPAM?
Not only business analysts, developers, designers, quality engineers, but also real scientists: chemists and biologists work at EPAM. They do not wear white coats and are not satisfied with spectacular experiments, but they do complex and important work.
What do chemists and biologists do in IT companies and why do customers appreciate their work?
Three years ago, a Life Sciences division appeared in EPAM, where, among others, chemists and biologists work. We cooperate with 9 of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Part of the work to create products for them is to conduct an essay (from English to excerpt to make excerpts): researchers find scientific facts in articles and enter them into a special database.
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Why do companies need executives and why they value their services highly? The fact is that their work helps to accomplish three important tasks:
Every year, thousands of scientific studies of varying degrees of relevance and utility are conducted in the world. Expertots systematize their results and enter information into special databases. This is necessary to separate useful discoveries from those that science cannot use - at least for now. Pharmaceutical companies are turning to such databases when they select substances to create new drugs. Sometimes the discovery "shoots out" very soon: the results of today's research can be useful for pharmaceuticals in 10 and 20 years.
To market medicine whose side effects outweigh the benefits, both inhuman and expensive. There are cases when new drugs carried more harm than good. For example, their long-term use adversely affected the health of patients. If all the data on the effects of certain drugs on the body were previously collected in one place and properly analyzed, they probably would not have appeared on the market at all.
Clinical studies are conducted to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of new drugs. Volunteers are selected on a large set of criteria, deviation from which may distort the results. With the support of the databases created with the participation of exerters, the choice of volunteers becomes more accurate, and it is great saves budgets. The fact is that testing on one person costs about 10 million dollars. An incorrectly selected volunteer is already a very expensive mistake, not to mention recruiting a whole group of 100 people.
In the market of the essay of scientific literature, the competition between customers (mainly pharmaceutical companies) and contractors is almost equally high. The most serious competitors for our exerting scientists are specialists from the Philippines, Eastern Europe and India.
Without specialized education to cope with such work is impossible. A non-biologist will not understand biological research from the point of view of methodology: what is being done, why, what the result says. In addition, the specialization within a particular science is important: for example, a physiologist will not be able to extract data on genetics from an article, and vice versa. And in order to teach a person to properly read articles on inorganic chemistry, it will take three years.
More than 200 exerters who read scientific articles - not only in English, but also in German, Chinese, Japanese and other languages work in St. Petersburg Eram. Once our scientists worked on a project where it was necessary to understand the scientific literature in all European languages - and there are more than twenty of them.
Finding a chemist or biologist who can read a foreign language — especially if it’s not English — is very difficult. A few years ago, a project in Japanese came to EPAM, and the work did not stand up due to a happy accident: they found a man in the unit who could read in this language.
To create a medicine, biology, chemistry and pharmacology work together. Biology provides a basis - it examines the mechanisms of the processes in the body and how they are affected by various substances. Chemistry is looking for a structure that can act on the body properly with minimal side effects. Pharmacology uses their knowledge - conducts research on animals, and then - in humans.
It all starts with chemical and biological research, where there are trends. Antibiotics, anti-tumor drugs, drugs for diseases of the nervous system, behavioral disorders are being studied. To improve the delivery of drugs into the cell and increase their efficiency, the transport membrane structures and cell receptors are examined. Another trend is the study of plants. Modern chemistry allows you to decompose plant extract into molecules and explore how each of them affects different cells of the body. If you find that a particular substance is effective, for example, against inflammation, you can select it from the plant and take it as a basis for a new drug.
Scientific methods are developing, technology is being improved, which opens up tremendous opportunities for chemistry and biology. Twenty years ago, microscopes made it possible to study the medicinal effect on the body only at the tissue level, and now research is being done at the molecular level. It has become possible to influence the body more subtly, for example, to create drugs that affect the transport channel of the cell. The medicine can open it to deliver the active substance to the cell, or to close it and not to let the harmful structures inside. With the help of modern drugs, you can even "turn on" and "turn off" certain sections of DNA.
This all becomes possible thanks to the exerters who work with scientific articles. This work is complex and routine, and the question arises: is it possible to automate it? Short answer: partially.
EPAM has developed an online tool for exortores chemists. His goal is not to replace scientists, but to free them from routine operations. The application helps to separate relevant articles from irrelevant for a specific task, to determine the necessary information in the relevant article, automatically extract the necessary chemical information, correct errors and typos in a PDF document and optically recognize chemical structures. The project was based on the use of machine learning technologies. Eram specialists have developed algorithms that search for and highlight chemical facts in texts. They are well managed to be found in a specific environment and in a standard form (for example, the melting point is always denoted by a number or numerical range). However, it is not always possible for the application to discover complex facts: articles are written by living people without reliance on a specific sample.
It all started with a dictionary created to help the EPAM exerters. Scientists do not always find comprehensive information in articles and are forced to supplement it with facts from sources regulated by the customer (earlier these were books and scans from them). They were combined into a common database, made a convenient search for it, and added another functional necessary for exeptors - a dictionary turned out. Already he alone has accelerated the processing of 20% of articles ten times.
One of the users of the dictionary shared statistics. Previously, it took 5 days to process an article containing 200 compounds, and with a dictionary this time was reduced to 4 hours.
There are a lot of people in the Life Sciences division whose average age is higher than that of other company employees. There are those who are over 60 or 70, and at first glance their work may seem boring. But it is thanks to the experts who classify the results of scientific research that new medicines, vaccinations and immunostimulants appear. And this, if it does not save the whole world, gives many people a chance to live longer.
What do chemists and biologists do in IT companies and why do customers appreciate their work?
Three years ago, a Life Sciences division appeared in EPAM, where, among others, chemists and biologists work. We cooperate with 9 of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Part of the work to create products for them is to conduct an essay (from English to excerpt to make excerpts): researchers find scientific facts in articles and enter them into a special database.
')
Why do companies need executives and why they value their services highly? The fact is that their work helps to accomplish three important tasks:
1. Find out what substances can make medicine
Every year, thousands of scientific studies of varying degrees of relevance and utility are conducted in the world. Expertots systematize their results and enter information into special databases. This is necessary to separate useful discoveries from those that science cannot use - at least for now. Pharmaceutical companies are turning to such databases when they select substances to create new drugs. Sometimes the discovery "shoots out" very soon: the results of today's research can be useful for pharmaceuticals in 10 and 20 years.
2. Insure against the production of low-quality drugs
To market medicine whose side effects outweigh the benefits, both inhuman and expensive. There are cases when new drugs carried more harm than good. For example, their long-term use adversely affected the health of patients. If all the data on the effects of certain drugs on the body were previously collected in one place and properly analyzed, they probably would not have appeared on the market at all.
3. Correctly select volunteers for clinical trials.
Clinical studies are conducted to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of new drugs. Volunteers are selected on a large set of criteria, deviation from which may distort the results. With the support of the databases created with the participation of exerters, the choice of volunteers becomes more accurate, and it is great saves budgets. The fact is that testing on one person costs about 10 million dollars. An incorrectly selected volunteer is already a very expensive mistake, not to mention recruiting a whole group of 100 people.
In the market of the essay of scientific literature, the competition between customers (mainly pharmaceutical companies) and contractors is almost equally high. The most serious competitors for our exerting scientists are specialists from the Philippines, Eastern Europe and India.
Without specialized education to cope with such work is impossible. A non-biologist will not understand biological research from the point of view of methodology: what is being done, why, what the result says. In addition, the specialization within a particular science is important: for example, a physiologist will not be able to extract data on genetics from an article, and vice versa. And in order to teach a person to properly read articles on inorganic chemistry, it will take three years.
More than 200 exerters who read scientific articles - not only in English, but also in German, Chinese, Japanese and other languages work in St. Petersburg Eram. Once our scientists worked on a project where it was necessary to understand the scientific literature in all European languages - and there are more than twenty of them.
Finding a chemist or biologist who can read a foreign language — especially if it’s not English — is very difficult. A few years ago, a project in Japanese came to EPAM, and the work did not stand up due to a happy accident: they found a man in the unit who could read in this language.
To create a medicine, biology, chemistry and pharmacology work together. Biology provides a basis - it examines the mechanisms of the processes in the body and how they are affected by various substances. Chemistry is looking for a structure that can act on the body properly with minimal side effects. Pharmacology uses their knowledge - conducts research on animals, and then - in humans.
It all starts with chemical and biological research, where there are trends. Antibiotics, anti-tumor drugs, drugs for diseases of the nervous system, behavioral disorders are being studied. To improve the delivery of drugs into the cell and increase their efficiency, the transport membrane structures and cell receptors are examined. Another trend is the study of plants. Modern chemistry allows you to decompose plant extract into molecules and explore how each of them affects different cells of the body. If you find that a particular substance is effective, for example, against inflammation, you can select it from the plant and take it as a basis for a new drug.
Scientific methods are developing, technology is being improved, which opens up tremendous opportunities for chemistry and biology. Twenty years ago, microscopes made it possible to study the medicinal effect on the body only at the tissue level, and now research is being done at the molecular level. It has become possible to influence the body more subtly, for example, to create drugs that affect the transport channel of the cell. The medicine can open it to deliver the active substance to the cell, or to close it and not to let the harmful structures inside. With the help of modern drugs, you can even "turn on" and "turn off" certain sections of DNA.
This all becomes possible thanks to the exerters who work with scientific articles. This work is complex and routine, and the question arises: is it possible to automate it? Short answer: partially.
EPAM has developed an online tool for exortores chemists. His goal is not to replace scientists, but to free them from routine operations. The application helps to separate relevant articles from irrelevant for a specific task, to determine the necessary information in the relevant article, automatically extract the necessary chemical information, correct errors and typos in a PDF document and optically recognize chemical structures. The project was based on the use of machine learning technologies. Eram specialists have developed algorithms that search for and highlight chemical facts in texts. They are well managed to be found in a specific environment and in a standard form (for example, the melting point is always denoted by a number or numerical range). However, it is not always possible for the application to discover complex facts: articles are written by living people without reliance on a specific sample.
It all started with a dictionary created to help the EPAM exerters. Scientists do not always find comprehensive information in articles and are forced to supplement it with facts from sources regulated by the customer (earlier these were books and scans from them). They were combined into a common database, made a convenient search for it, and added another functional necessary for exeptors - a dictionary turned out. Already he alone has accelerated the processing of 20% of articles ten times.
One of the users of the dictionary shared statistics. Previously, it took 5 days to process an article containing 200 compounds, and with a dictionary this time was reduced to 4 hours.
There are a lot of people in the Life Sciences division whose average age is higher than that of other company employees. There are those who are over 60 or 70, and at first glance their work may seem boring. But it is thanks to the experts who classify the results of scientific research that new medicines, vaccinations and immunostimulants appear. And this, if it does not save the whole world, gives many people a chance to live longer.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/334282/
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