Finding the drug dose and mouse strain combination to help manual searches

Kyle Medak studies what GLP-1 receptor agonists do inside the kidney, including follow-up work exploring positive findings from a completed clinical trial, which showed that semaglutide benefits people with diabetic kidney disease. Part of his job is figuring out whether that benefit comes from a direct effect on the kidney or a systemic one that reaches the kidney second-hand, and that means designing experiments carefully around a certain details - some strains of lab mice are resistant to kidney injury, so results depend heavily on which strain and which exact dose a prior study used.

Kyle asked EMET to “show me every study that used [this dose] of [a drug] in [this strain of] mice”. EMET surfaced a set of studies he had not found through his own searching, some of which fed directly into his experimental design.

"It dug into a bunch of papers that it would have taken me all day to do," he says, "and I might not have found otherwise."

Pulling references together, he asked EMET to organize its findings into a table, one row per study, with the dose each one used. He has since shown the workflow to colleagues, who adopted the same table habit for their own literature pulls.

What he values most is straightforward: EMET is meant to read full papers rather than abstracts alone, and when he pushed on a gap he suspected shouldn't exist, it found that paper and others in the same narrow area.