  The overwhelming amount of available scholarly literature in the life
sciences poses significant challenges to scientists wishing to keep up with
important developments related to their research, but also provides a useful
resource for the discovery of recent information concerning genes, diseases,
compounds and the interactions between them. In this paper, we describe an
algorithm called Bio-LDA that uses extracted biological terminology to
automatically identify latent topics, and provides a variety of measures to
uncover putative relations among topics and bio-terms. Relationships identified
using those approaches are combined with existing data in life science datasets
to provide additional insight. Three case studies demonstrate the utility of
the Bio-LDA model, including association predication, association search and
connectivity map generation. This combined approach offers new opportunities
for knowledge discovery in many areas of biology including target
identification, lead hopping and drug repurposing.
