Automatic filtering and substantiation of drug safety signals

Drug safety issues pose serious health threats to the population and constitute a major cause of mortality worldwide. Due to the prominent implications to both public health and the pharmaceutical industry, it is of great importance to unravel the molecular mechanisms by which an adverse drug reaction can be potentially elicited. These mechanisms can be investigated by placing the pharmaco-epidemiologically detected adverse drug reaction in an information-rich context and by exploiting all currently available biomedical knowledge to substantiate it. We present a computational framework for the biological annotation of potential adverse drug reactions. First, the proposed framework investigates previous evidences on the drug-event association in the context of biomedical literature (signal filtering). Then, it seeks to provide a biological explanation (signal substantiation) by exploring mechanistic connections that might explain why a drug produces a specific adverse reaction. The mechanistic connections include the activity of the drug, related compounds and drug metabolites on protein targets, the association of protein targets to clinical events, and the annotation of proteins (both protein targets and proteins associated with clinical events) to biological pathways. Hence, the workflows for signal filtering and substantiation integrate modules for literature and database mining, in silico drug-target profiling, and analyses based on gene-disease networks and biological pathways. Application examples of these workflows carried out on selected cases of drug safety signals are discussed. The methodology and workflows presented offer a novel approach to explore the molecular mechanisms underlying adverse drug reactions

Posibles causas de la reducción de la población penitenciaria en España y Cataluña entre 2010 y 2013 : Efecto de la Ley Orgánica 5/2010 sobre esta reducción

Desde 1980 hasta 2010, la población penitenciaria no dejó de crecer. Sin embargo, desde 2010 esta tasa se está reduciendo. En este trabajo se trata de buscar una serie de explicaciones para este aumento, y para la posterior reducción. Se pone especialatención en la entrada en vigor de la Ley Orgánica 5/2010, que supuso una extensa reforma del Código Penal. Con esta Ley Orgánica, se introdujo la posibilidad de reducir en un grado ciertas conductas contra la salud pública, en forma de subtipo atenuado.Esto puede haber supuesto un efecto considerable sobre la reducción de las tasas de encarcelamiento. Para estudiar el efecto de este nuevo subtipo, se realiza una pequeña investigación cuantitativa sobre una muestra de sentencias por delitos contra la saludpública. Después, se muestran los resultados y se proponen nuevas líneas de investigación.

The EU-ADR Web Platform: delivering advanced pharmacovigilance tools

PURPOSE: Pharmacovigilance methods have advanced greatly during the last decades, making post-market drug assessment an essential drug evaluation component. These methods mainly rely on the use of spontaneous reporting systems and health information databases to collect expertise from huge amounts of real-world reports. The EU-ADR Web Platform was built to further facilitate accessing, monitoring and exploring these data, enabling an in-depth analysis of adverse drug reactions risks.METHODS: The EU-ADR Web Platform exploits the wealth of data collected within a large-scale European initiative, the EU-ADR project. Millions of electronic health records, provided by national health agencies, are mined for specific drug events, which are correlated with literature, protein and pathway data, resulting in a rich drug-event dataset. Next, advanced distributed computing methods are tailored to coordinate the execution of data-mining and statistical analysis tasks. This permits obtaining a ranked drug-event list, removing spurious entries and highlighting relationships with high risk potential.RESULTS: The EU-ADR Web Platform is an open workspace for the integrated analysis of pharmacovigilance datasets. Using this software, researchers can access a variety of tools provided by distinct partners in a single centralized environment. Besides performing standalone drug-event assessments, they can also control the pipeline for an improved batch analysis of custom datasets. Drug-event pairs can be substantiated and statistically analysed within the platform's innovative working environment.CONCLUSIONS: A pioneering workspace that helps in explaining the biological path of adverse drug reactions was developed within the EU-ADR project consortium. This tool, targeted at the pharmacovigilance community, is available online at https://bioinformatics.ua.pt/euadr/. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Elaboració d"una base de dades per a l"autoformació i autoavaluació de coneixements i competències en estudis científics superiors

L'objectiu principal és oferir uns recursos educatius multimèdia (en format HTML i JAVA) utilitzables en línea (Internet) o en suport autònom (CD-ROM) per a l'autoformació i l'autoevaluació ...