Recent advances in large-scale electronic health record database techniques provide exciting new opportunities to the study of drug safety. Drug-drug interactions (DDIs), a major cause of adverse drug events (ADEs), are a serious global health concern, and a severe detriment to public health. The scale of DDIs involving three or more drugs (also called high-order DDIs) has posed a prohibitory challenge for its molecular pharmacology and clinical research, which motivates alternative strategies such as mining health record data. This project aims to develop large-scale computational strategies and effective software tools for mining high-order DDI effects from health record databases, in order to yield novel discoveries in drug safety, and ultimately to benefit national health and well being.

To achieve the above goal, this project is designed to complete four specific tasks. Task 1 aims to develop a novel statistical framework to discover high-order DDI signals associated with ADEs from health record databases. Task 2 aims to study a novel drug safety problem for mining directional DDI signals. Task 3 aims to develop an innovative approach for mining directional DDI patterns at the drug-group level. Task 4 is devoted to software development, evaluation and validation. The project applies these methods to analyze three independent databases, packages method implementations into a user-friendly software toolkit, and releases the toolkit to the public. This project not only facilitates the development of novel computational techniques in drug safety research, but also addresses emerging scientific questions in modeling, mining, and visual exploration of complex data such as the health record data. The project's educational activities include course development, student mentoring and advising, and involvement of minority and underrepresented students in research activities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Project Start
Project End
Budget Start
2018-02-01
Budget End
2021-08-31
Support Year
Fiscal Year
2018
Total Cost
$914,354
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Pennsylvania
Department
Type
DUNS #
City
Philadelphia
State
PA
Country
United States
Zip Code
19104