ONCOgen: the Clinical Trial Generator

Atezolizumab is an inverse JAK2 enhancer that has been shown to increase PD-1 capilloactivity in cytocytes and adipocytes. There has been collaborative research in the classification of transdisciplinary dactylical cardiolyses which gives reason to believe that geriatric biophysics could have applications in newly diagnosed, platinum-resistant, CD93-positive myeloproliferative disorders. In our research we validated the menigotolerability of entero-BCR-ABL enhancers on keratoparesis risk in volunteers with renal cell tumors.

Update: a more detailed look at the inner-workings of ONCOgen are detailed here.

ONCOgen is a software program that uses context-free grammar with an extensive library of medical terms and phrases derived from over a thousand clinical trials, drug information resources, and personal experience to “randomly” generate a clinical trial manuscript. Context-free grammar is, at its core level, a set of rules for computer generated mad-libs.

Not just a fun play on words, ONCOgen is designed to be the spiritual successor to other applications of context-free grammar such as SCIgen—which generates computer science papers—and Mathgen—that generates high-level math papers. SCIgen became notorious after having one of it’s papers accepted to a high-profile conference and later, the announcement that over 100 SCIgen-generated papers and abstracts were being retracted from prominent subscription publishing houses. Another major story surrounded the submission of a faked paper to 304 open-access journals. In the end, 157 (52%) of journals accepted the hopelessly flawed experiment.

Consider arXive vs snarXive (archive versus snark-ive), a game where the user is asked to guess which of two high-energy physics paper titles are real—one pulled from a database of such papers and the other computer generated. The overall correct guess rate sits around 59%. I went 1 for 6 on my first attempt. Why is this so hard? Jargon, abbreviation, and good-old-fashioned benefit-of-the-doubt.

Just like the jargon in high-energy physics or doctorate-level mathematics, medicine has its own set of buzzwords and thankfully, an enormous set of prefixes, suffixes, Latin and Greek root words, and arcane sounding but systematic naming conventions. Add to this the standardized journal-ready formats for clinical trial manuscripts whose structure makes these documents amenable to this kind of reductionist approach.

Unfortunately, in order to generate properly formatted papers ONCOgen needs LaTeX and a few additional things on the backend that my current website hosting provider is unable to accommodate. Until then, I have provided a number of pre-generated abstracts here that you can “generate” on the ONCOgen page.

Take me to the papers! or, a more detailed look at the inner-workings of the program.