FDA Calls For Text-Mining Software.

Modern Healthcare (4/6, McKinney, Subscription Publication) reports, "The Food and Drug Administration has put out a call to vendors for text-mining software that relies on natural language processing. The software will be used by the agency's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research 'to rapidly analyze documents to find therapeutically useful and possibly unknown associations between drugs, disease processes, adverse events and therapeutic agents,' the FDA said in a request for proposals published on the Federal Business Opportunities website." The FDA expects "to choose a vendor based on overall value" and to announce the award in May.