KnowledgeScan

KnowledgeScan™ is a specialized Target Safety Assessment (TSA) service from Instem, designed to accelerate and improve decision-making in drug research and development. By combining a translational informatics platform, automated data mining, and expert human review, KnowledgeScan delivers robust, comprehensive, and reproducible TSAs that replace time-consuming and often incomplete manual literature reviews. It is intended for drug discovery teams, safety professionals, and research organizations seeking faster, more confident go/no-go decisions on biological targets.

The service is highly flexible and can be applied at any stage of the drug discovery process — from evaluating potential candidates to investigating unexpected preclinical findings. KnowledgeScan is offered in two tiers, a Full TSA and a Core TSA, allowing clients to select the level of assessment that best fits their specific needs and internal resources.

Key Benefits

• Saves Time: Automated data mining streamlines literature reviews, reducing manual effort and accelerating target safety assessments so researchers can focus on decision-making rather than data gathering.
• Reduced Bias: Systematic, automated workflows eliminate human bias, delivering an impartial and comprehensive view of target-related safety across vast literature and toxicology datasets.
• Removes Risk: Thorough safety profiling and expert interpretation reduce the chance of overlooking critical toxicology signals, helping to de-risk drug discovery efforts early and safeguard regulatory submissions.
• Increases Quality: Every report is curated and validated by scientific experts, ensuring high-quality, accurate insights to support decision-making in drug development.
• Expedites Development: Faster, standardized TSAs shorten the time from target selection to go/no-go decisions, helping accelerate drug candidate progression through development pipelines.

Core Features

• Powerful Visualizations: Easy-to-read plots help researchers quickly interpret large volumes of bioinformatics, pharmacology, and toxicology data to support faster, more confident decisions.
• Transparent Methodology: Every step in the assessment process is fully traceable and reproducible, simplifying internal reviews and regulatory submissions.
• Knowledge Gaps Identified: The platform identifies missing or underrepresented areas in the data, helping teams plan follow-up research and reduce uncertainty in target assessments.
• Pharmacology Review: Analyzes known drug-target interactions, ligand activity, and pharmacodynamic data to predict how modulating a target may affect biological systems.
• Physiological Review: Evaluates a target's function in both healthy and disease states to help researchers understand the full biological impact of therapeutic intervention.
• Toxicology and Safety Alerts: Automatically highlights relevant toxicity signals and safety alerts from trusted literature and data sources to support early risk mitigation.
• Bioinformatics Review: Processes genomic and proteomic data to uncover critical patterns, associations, and unintended target effects.
• Systematic Anatomical Review: Reviews target expression across tissues and organs to flag site-specific risks and refine candidate selection strategies.

How KnowledgeScan Works

1. Consultation: The process begins with a collaborative discussion to help Instem understand client priorities and define the project scope.
2. Knowledge Acquisition: Using advanced data-mining tools, Instem extracts and refines millions of data points from published sources across pharmacology, bioinformatics, and toxicology.
3. Curation: Expert scientists classify, tag, and further refine the data to ensure accuracy, relevance, and scientific integrity.
4. Interpretation (Full TSA): The team analyzes and discusses the toxicological significance of findings, drawing evidence-based conclusions to guide decision-making.
5. Continuous Updates (Full TSA): Clients can opt into Evergreen updates to receive regular reports as new internal and external data emerges.

Customer Success: Haisco Pharmaceutical Group

• Haisco Pharmaceutical Group needed to streamline its TSA process to support rapid R&D decisions, but limited published data on novel targets made safety analysis time-consuming and resource-intensive.
• By partnering with Instem and implementing KnowledgeScan, Haisco combined automated data mining, expert review, and standardized reporting to complement its in-house capabilities.
• Results included significantly accelerated TSA production, improved evidence-based decision-making through comprehensive curated reports, and optimized use of internal resources by freeing scientists from manual data searches. A separate client case study reported a 400% increase in annual TSA throughput following outsourcing to KnowledgeScan.

KnowledgeScan is delivered as a fully outsourced service — clients submit their target of interest and Instem's team returns a comprehensive, standardized assessment report. Reports can complement in-house assessments or serve as a complete outsourced solution. Clients receive ongoing access to scientific experts, including post-report discussions, and can opt into Evergreen updates for continuous data monitoring. The service supports regulatory confidence through reproducible workflows and transparent, expert-validated methodologies.