News
QResearch supports European project for early detection of adverse
drug reactions
27 March 2008
QResearch, a not-for-profit partnership between EMIS and the
University of Nottingham, is supporting the ALERT project, the first
large scale European-wide initiative to detect adverse drug reactions
(ADRs).
The QResearch database, which houses anonymised data from around 10
million UK patients, is the largest and most rapidly updated database
taking part in the project. The project has received €5 million funding
from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme
(FP7/2007-2013).
The recently approved ALERT project (full title: Early Detection of
Adverse Drug Events by Integrative Mining of Clinical Records and
Biomedical Knowledge) aims to develop the first Europe-wide computerised
system to detect ADRs better and faster than the current spontaneous
reporting systems. The initial research phase is planned to span 3.5
years.
The project will involve a consortium of 18 leading European research
institutions [1] using clinical data from the electronic healthcare
records (EHRs) of over 30 million patients from European countries
including The Netherlands, Denmark, UK and Italy.
The interdisciplinary team of researchers will use biomedical
informatics technologies combined with biological and molecular
knowledge.
ALERT will use a variety of text mining, epidemiological and other
computational techniques to analyse the EHRs to detect ‘signals’
(combinations of drugs and suspected adverse events that warrant further
investigation).
QResearch project leader, Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox of the
University of Nottingham said: “ALERT will, for the first time, design,
develop and set up a process for monitoring adverse drug reactions for a
significant proportion of the European population.
“We hope that the project will demonstrate that scientific and
clinical evidence can quickly and directly be translated into
improvements in patient safety and therefore health benefits. It will
also enable us to compare how different people respond to a variety of
drugs throughout Europe.
“Another benefit of the research will mean that we should be able to
discriminate between true signals that point to an ADR and spurious
signals. This can help to reduce uncertainty among both patients and
physicians, ultimately saving lives and increasing the quality of
day-to-day life for many patients.”
1. Participating institutions:
- Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark
- Agenzia regionale di Sanità, Italy
- AstraZeneca AB, Sweden
- Erasmus University Medical Center, Netherlands
- Fundació IMIM, Spain
- Health Search, Italian College of General Practitioners, Italy
- Imperial College London, UK
- IRCCS Centro Neurolesi “Bonino-Pulejo”, Italy
- London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, UK
- PHARMO Coöperation UA, Netherlands
- Societa’ Servizi Telematici SRL, Italy
- Tel-Aviv University, Israel
- Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
- Université Victor-Segalen Bordeaux II, France
- University of Aveiro – IEETA, Portugal
- University of Nottingham, UK
- University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain
- University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
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