Normalization of Drug and Therapeutic Concepts with TheraPy

Working with therapeutic terminology in the field of medicine can be challenging due to both the number of ways terms can be addressed and the ambiguity associated with different naming strategies. A therapeutic concept can be identified across many facets from ontologies and vocabularies of varying focus, including natural product names, chemical structures, development codes, generic names, brand names, product formulations, or treatment regimens. This diversity of nomenclature makes therapeutic terminology difficult to manage and harmonize. As the number and complexity of available therapeutic ontologies continues to increase, the need for harmonized cross-resource mappings is becoming increasingly apparent. Harmonized concept mappings will enable the linking together of like-concepts despite source-dependent differences in data structure or semantic representation. To support these mappings, we introduce TheraPy, a Python package and web API that constructs stable, searchable merged concepts for drugs and therapeutic terminologies using publicly available resources and thesauri. By using a directed graph approach, TheraPy can capture commonly used aliases, trade names, annotations, and associations for any given therapeutic and combine them under a single merged concept record. Using this approach, we found that TheraPy tends to normalize therapeutic concepts to their underlying active ingredients (excluding non-drug therapeutics, e.g. radiation therapy, biologics), and unifies all available descriptors regardless of ontological origin. In this report, we highlight the creation of 16,069 unique merged therapeutic concepts from 9 distinct sources using TheraPy. Further, we analyze rates of normalization for therapeutic terms taken from publicly available vocabularies. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. ### Funding Statement This study did not receive any funding. ### Author Declarations I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained. Yes I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals. Yes I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance). Yes I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable. Yes All data produced in the present work are contained in the manuscript. Additionally, database and application resources used in the paper are available online for public access at: