QResearch Supports Largest European Project For The Early Detection Of Adverse Drug Reactions

Main Category: Pharmacy / Pharmacist
Also Included In: Regulatory Affairs / Drug Approvals;  Pharma Industry / Biotech Industry
Article Date: 21 Mar 2008 - 2:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   view / write opinions   rate article

QResearch - a not-for-profit partnership between EMIS and the University of Nottingham - is supporting the first large scale European-wide initiative to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs) - the ALERT project.

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, which has received €5 million funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement nº 215847.

The recently approved ALERT project 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 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 to do this, 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."

Qresearch is a not-for-profit partnership between EMIS and the University of Nottingham. http://www.qresearch.org.

EMIS is the UK's leading provider of IT systems to primary health care, providing the software that holds the medical records for 39 million NHS patients nationwide. http://www.emis-online.com

The full title of the ALERT project is: 'Early Detection of Adverse Drug Events by Integrative Mining of Clinical Records and Biomedical Knowledge'.

The ALERT project began on 1 February 2008 with a total duration of 42 months.

Participating institutions include

-- 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