Embase Classic Use Cases

To find out more about how we help to find the biomedical answers our customers need, read our customer case studies.

REACH Regulation

REACH is a European Union regulation which applies to chemicals and their safe use.

REACH requires all manufacturers and importers of chemicals in the European Union to identify and manage risks linked to the substances they manufacture and market. As such, industry must bear most of the responsibilities to manage the risks posed by chemicals and provide appropriate safety information to users.

A senior retrieval expert of a top five pharmaceutical company explains how Embase is used to comply with REACH regulation:

“Embase helps us in our efforts to comply with the REACH regulation and especially the older research information that Embase retrieves is important to us.

Embase Classic provides us with complete research results and access to research results that have previously been determined relevant and are still valid today.

• Analytical measurement results
• Clinical studies
• Pharmacological effectiveness/potential
• Toxicological studies

This is an example of how these research results help us in our research:

A toxic substance is determined and subsequently removed from usage. There is no more exposure – therefore no new toxicological studies are conducted. This means that the research of these toxicological results from earlier days would not be available in current literature but is available using Embase as this database covers research from 1947 until today.

The possible consequences of missing this vital research information are:

• That a toxic substance might be used again causing severe unwanted effects.
• The same test might be conducted a second time, without gaining new insights and spending money that could have been saved.”

Adverse Drug Reaction Monitoring

A 24 year old volunteer died of respiratory and renal failure after inhaling hexamethonium during a clinical research project at a respected academic institution in North America.

According to the US Office of Human Research Protections, the researchers failed to obtain published literature about the known association between hexamethonium and lung toxicity.

How were these articles missed? The answer, it seems is that all were published before 1966 and as a result none appeared in a search of the PubMed database at the time of the clinical research project.

Eugene Garfield, who pioneered many aspects of bibliometrics, including citation analysis, and founded the Institute of Scientific Information, agreed that "the older literature is frequently overlooked".

Several cases of respiratory failure attributable to a "fibrinous pneumonitis" syndrome were reported in the ‘50s in patients receiving hexamethonium.

Neuroscientist Douglass S DeWitt observed that "it is all too easy to assume that MEDLINE encompasses the whole of the medical literature"

As researchers discover new uses for old drugs – as in the current test of the 1940s malaria drug quinacrine for variant Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease – it seems certain that new questions that might be answered in the old literature will continue to arise.

1966 and all that - when is literature search done?
Faith McLellan
The Lancet, 358:9282 (2001)

Finding of New Uses for Old Drugs

Thalidomide was first synthesized in 1954 and was found to be an effective sedative and sleep-inducing agent in humans. It was also found to be an effective anti-emetic in pregnancy and its use subsequently increased. After 1956 reports of deformed babies started appearing and by the time it was withdrawn in 1961, 5,000-12,000 deformed babies were already born.

In 1964, Jacob Sheskin, experimentally prescribed thalidomide to an advanced ENL patient and the results were dramatic, the patient slept soundly with no subsequent hangover and his ENL-related pain and fever resolved entirely and the cutaneous sores healed within days.

To date more than 100,000 patients have been prescribed thalidomide without any drug-related birth defects and is the World Health Organization’s recommended drug for this form of leprosy.

Potential activity has been observed in clinical trials for various hemotological and solid tumor cancers including relapsed and/or refractory multiple myeloma, myelodysplastic syndrome, mantle cell lymphoma, glioma, renal cell carcinoma, metastatic melanoma, pancreatic cancer and androgen independent prostate cancer.

The past might have been devastating but the future for thalidomide is looking promising.

Thalidomide as a novel therapeutic agent: new uses for an old product
Steve K. Teo, David I. Stirling and Jerome B. Zeldis
Drug Discovery Today, 10:2 (2005)