Text mining for drug discovery

Recent advances in technology have led to the exponential growth of scientific literature in biomedical sciences. This rapid increase in information has surpassed the threshold for manual curation efforts, necessitating the use of text mining approaches in the field of life sciences. One such application of text mining is in fostering in silico drug discovery such as drug target screening, pharmacogenomics, adverse drug event detection, etc. This chapter serves as an introduction to the applications of various text mining approaches in drug discovery. It is divided into two parts with the first half as an overview of text mining in the biosciences. The second half of the chapter reviews strategies and methods for four unique applications of text mining in drug discovery.