Pharmaceutical Industry Vocabulary

Ethical, economic, and competitive reasons, as well as those of safety and efficacy, support the need to monitor impurities in drug products.9 However, monitoring impurities and controlling these impurities mean different things to different people or to the same people at different times, even those in the pharmaceutical sciences and industry.2 A unified terminology is necessary to assure that everyone uses the same vocabulary when addressing questions related to impurities. In this context, the leadership provided by ICH is very helpful. 

The private toxicity databases offer more accurate toxicity data and the extended chemical space of representative structures in comparison with pubhc databases. Despite expansion of the chemical space and various numbers of proposed descriptors, the private databases have limitations related to the models selection, types of algorithms and the content of data, which is probably a part of confidential business information, such as a proprietary structure of pharmaceutical molecules. The private toxicity databases may also provide internal systems created by industry or government agencies [21]. These databases may not be suitable for a commercial usage, but are useful for the internal analysis. Therefore, pubhcation of the scientific research based on these data is often difficult to evaluate independently. The most known commercial databases associated with toxicity are Acceliys Toxicity Database (contains information about the structure and different types of toxicity for more than 150,000 compoimds from RTECS and other sources) and Leadscope Toxicity Database. Standardization of toxicity databases is designed to facilitate integration between different sources and to provide their quality. Since databases are often not compatible with each other, standardization initiatives (e g., controlled vocabularies) can help to combine their data [22]. 

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