Digging for Drug Facts.

The article looks at the use of datamining to track drug adverse effects and interactions by biomedical informatics researchers Russ Altman and Nicolas Tatonetti at Stanford University, California. They found a significant resource of bioinformatics drug effect data in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Events Reporting System (AERS) spontaneous database, although they discovered statistical noise and biases in the data. Topics discussed include the identification of covariates based on drug combinations and patient symptoms, the potential use of data from electronic medical records (EMRs), and the combination of data from multiple datasets to improve statistical strength. INSET: Information, Drugs, and Chemical Properties.