Representing conflicting evidence and refutation

Lilly recently halted development of of the Alzheimer's drug
"semagacestat" because it was making patients worse in two late stage
clinical trials. This type of knowledge seems like very valuable
information to researchers in Alzheimer's. However, in recent searches
of http://clinicaltrials.gov such as
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=semagacestat, it seems that
the news hasn't been incorporated into the data on the website.
However, assuming that it had been added, I am curious how 'cancelled
clinical trials' can be found in the linked data. Has anyone looked at
this?

http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/lilly-halts-alzheimers-drug-trial/?scp=2&sq=alzheimer's%20disease&st=cse

Another example of contradiction/refutation, this time found in
PubMed, is that Metformin apparently doesn't work (only) along the
pathways that previous research indicated:

"Metformin inhibits hepatic gluconeogenesis in mice independently of
the LKB1/AMPK pathway via a decrease in hepatic energy state"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2898585/

Has anyone seen a way to deal with conflicting information like this
in text mining? If we were to represent this information in RDF, could
we do it in such a way that we could observe the change of the
Metformin association with LKB1/AMPK pathways over time in the
literature?

Cheers,
Scott

P.S. Oktie - It is pure coincidence that the first example is from
clinical trials. :)

-- 
M. Scott Marshall, W3C HCLS IG co-chair
Leiden University Medical Center / University of Amsterdam
http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall

Received on Wednesday, 13 October 2010 13:44:01 UTC