Time-Tracking-based Research of Drug Development in Pharmaceutical Fields ——A Case Study on Metformin

[Purpose/Significance]: At present, the bibliometric analysis methods used in the field of medicine are difficult to dig deeply into the text content, and most of them still stay in the stage of macroscopic analysis of the text. This paper adopts an analysis method of time-tracking, taking the text of metformin drugs as an example, through further mining of the text content, which is helpful to deeply explore the life cycle of drugs, research overview in different periods, changes in drug therapeutic uses, research hotspots, and explore the reuse potential of future drugs in new fields. [Method/Process]: In view of the shortcomings of the current research methods of text mining in the field of medicine, we extracted the inspection labels, subtitles and indexing terms of all metformin drugs texts included in the Pubmed database from 1959 to 2020. Using the correspondence analysis, cluster analysis and statistical methods to conduct dimensionality reduction of the data, and explore the information behind the text by a more microscopic way. [Result]: The paper revealed the characteristics and reasons of metformin drugs in the process of entire historical development. It was found that metformin has drug reposition value in the treatment of obesity, cardio-cerebrovascular diseases, polycystic ovary syndrome, anticancer, anti-inflammatory, altering gut microbiome composition and anti-aging, etc. And it predicted that metformin may have the drug reuse potential in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, neurodegenerative diseases and androdegenerative alopecia, etc. At the same time, the study of AMPK hypoglycemic mechanism will become the focus and hotspot of other hypoglycemic drug research and development institute. [Conclusion]: The experimental results prove that the analysis method of time-tracking can effectively test the drug research overview.