Mast Cell Diseases in Practice and Research: Issues and Perspectives Raised by Patients and Their Recommendations to the Scientific Community and Beyond

Background: Since 2010, patients and physicians have collaborated to understand unmet needs of patients with mast cell diseases, incorporating mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders, which include mast cell activation syndromes. Objective: This Open Innovation in Science project aims to expand understanding of the needs of patients affected by mast cell diseases, and encourage global communication among patient advocacy groups, physicians, researchers, industry, and government. A major aim is to support the scientific community's efforts to improve diagnosis, management, therapy, and patients’ quality of life by addressing unmet needs. Methods: In collaboration with mast cell disease specialists, 13 patient advocacy groups from 12 countries and regions developed lists of top patient needs. A core team of leaders from patient advocacy groups collected and analyzed the data and proposed possible actions to address patient needs. Results: Findings identified similarities and differences among participating countries in unmet needs between patients with mastocytosis and those with mast cell activation syndromes. Issues emphasized struggles relating to the nature and rarity of mast cell diseases, their impact on quality of life, the diagnostic process, access to appropriate care, more effective treatment, and the need for research. Conclusions: Solutions vary across countries because situations differ, in particular regarding the existence of and access to centers of excellence and reference centers. Multifaceted mast cell activation syndrome barriers necessitate innovative approaches to improve access to appropriate care. The outcomes of this project should greatly support scientists and clinicians in their efforts to improve diagnosis, management, and treatment of patients with mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders.The authors thank Tania Bray, Jan Hempstead, Heather Mayne, Joanne Mulder-Brambleby, and Irene Wilson for their supporting contributions, and all patients and families affected by MCDs, who shared their needs and concerns for development of this project. Authors involved in study conception and design were P. Valent, S.V. Jennings, C.C. Finnerty, J.S. Hobart, M. Martín-Martínez, K.A. Sinclair, V.M. Slee, J. Agopian, C. Akin, I. Álvarez-Twose, P. Bonadonna, A.A. Bowman, K. Brockow, H. Bumbea, C. de Haro, J.S. Fok, K. Hartmann, N. Hegmann, O. Hermine, M. Kalisiak, C.H. Katelaris, J. Kurz, P. Marcis, D. Mayne, D. Mendoza, A. Moussy, G. Mudretzkyj, N. Nidelea Vaia, M. Niedoszytko, H. Oude Elberink, A. Orfao, D.H. Radia, S. Rosenmeier, E. Ribada, W. Schinhofen, J. Schwaab, F. Siebenhaar, M. Triggiani, G. Tripodo, R. Velazquez, Y. Wielink, F. Wimazal, T. Yigit, and C. Zubrinich. Authors involved in acquisition and review of data were S.V. Jennings, C.C. Finnerty, J.S. Hobart, M. Martín-Martínez, K.A. Sinclair, V.M. Slee, J. Agopian, C. Akin, I. Álvarez-Twose, P. Bonadonna, A.A. Bowman, K. Brockow, H. Bumbea, C. de Haro, J.S. Fok, K. Hartmann, N. Hegmann, O. Hermine, M. Kalisiak, C.H. Katelaris, J. Kurz, P. Marcis, D. Mayne, D. Mendoza, A. Moussy, G. Mudretzkyj, N. Nidelea Vaia, M. Niedoszytko, H. Oude Elberink, A. Orfao, D.H. Radia, S. Rosenmeier, E. Ribada, W. Schinhofen, J. Schwaab, F. Siebenhaar, M. Triggiani, G. Tripodo, R. Velazquez, Y. Wielink, F. Wimazal, T. Yigit, C. Zubrinich, and P. Valent. The Core Group (analysis and interpretation of data and drafting of the manuscript) include S.V. Jennings, C.C. Finnerty, J.S. Hobart, M. Martín-Martínez, K.A. Sinclair, and V.M. Slee. Critical revision was performed by S.V. Jennings, C.C. Finnerty, J.S. Hobart, M. Martín-Martínez, K.A. Sinclair, V.M. Slee, J. Agopian, C. Akin, I. Álvarez-Twose, P. Bonadonna, A.A. Bowman, K. Brockow, H. Bumbea, C. de Haro, J.S. Fok, K. Hartmann, N. Hegmann, O. Hermine, M. Kalisiak, C.H. Katelaris, J. Kurz, P. Marcis, D. Mayne, D. Mendoza, A. Moussy, G. Mudretzkyj, N. Nidelea Vaia, M. Niedoszytko, H. Oude Elberink, A. Orfao, D.H. Radia, S. Rosenmeier, E. Ribada, W. Schinhofen, J. Schwaab, F. Siebenhaar, M. Triggiani, G. Tripodo, R. Velazquez, Y. Wielink, F Wimazal, T. Yigit, C. Zubrinich, and P. Valent

Mast Cell Diseases in Practice and Research:Issues and Perspectives Raised by Patients and Their Recommendations to the Scientific Community and Beyond

Background: Since 2010, patients and physicians have collaborated to understand unmet needs of patients with mast cell diseases, incorporating mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders, which include mast cell activation syndromes. Objective: This Open Innovation in Science project aims to expand understanding of the needs of patients affected by mast cell diseases, and encourage global communication among patient advocacy groups, physicians, researchers, industry, and government. A major aim is to support the scientific community's efforts to improve diagnosis, management, therapy, and patients’ quality of life by addressing unmet needs. Methods: In collaboration with mast cell disease specialists, 13 patient advocacy groups from 12 countries and regions developed lists of top patient needs. A core team of leaders from patient advocacy groups collected and analyzed the data and proposed possible actions to address patient needs. Results: Findings identified similarities and differences among participating countries in unmet needs between patients with mastocytosis and those with mast cell activation syndromes. Issues emphasized struggles relating to the nature and rarity of mast cell diseases, their impact on quality of life, the diagnostic process, access to appropriate care, more effective treatment, and the need for research. Conclusions: Solutions vary across countries because situations differ, in particular regarding the existence of and access to centers of excellence and reference centers. Multifaceted mast cell activation syndrome barriers necessitate innovative approaches to improve access to appropriate care. The outcomes of this project should greatly support scientists and clinicians in their efforts to improve diagnosis, management, and treatment of patients with mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Mast Cell Diseases in Practice and Research:Issues and Perspectives Raised by Patients and Their Recommendations to the Scientific Community and Beyond

Background: Since 2010, patients and physicians have collaborated to understand unmet needs of patients with mast cell diseases, incorporating mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders, which include mast cell activation syndromes.Objective: This Open Innovation in Science project aims to expand understanding of the needs of patients affected by mast cell diseases, and encourage global communication among patient advocacy groups, physicians, researchers, industry, and government. A major aim is to support the scientific community's efforts to improve diagnosis, management, therapy, and patients’ quality of life by addressing unmet needs.Methods: In collaboration with mast cell disease specialists, 13 patient advocacy groups from 12 countries and regions developed lists of top patient needs. A core team of leaders from patient advocacy groups collected and analyzed the data and proposed possible actions to address patient needs.Results: Findings identified similarities and differences among participating countries in unmet needs between patients with mastocytosis and those with mast cell activation syndromes. Issues emphasized struggles relating to the nature and rarity of mast cell diseases, their impact on quality of life, the diagnostic process, access to appropriate care, more effective treatment, and the need for research.Conclusions: Solutions vary across countries because situations differ, in particular regarding the existence of and access to centers of excellence and reference centers. Multifaceted mast cell activation syndrome barriers necessitate innovative approaches to improve access to appropriate care. The outcomes of this project should greatly support scientists and clinicians in their efforts to improve diagnosis, management, and treatment of patients with mastocytosis and mast cell activation disorders.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press