Data Mining
This article was originally published in Start Up
Executive Summary
Data mining is the neologism given to the tools of pattern recognition and discovery, themselves a grab bag of mathematical methods used to glean information from complex or noisy data sets. If the number of start-ups like Silicon Genetics is any measure, the pharmaceutical industry looks like data mining's next big market.
You may also be interested in...
Forget DTC; Get Ready for DFC: Using Social Media to Detect Safety Signals Direct From Consumers
The past decade has witnessed the importance of DTC pharma messages. With social media tracking and internet search signal detection, is the US at the edge of a DFC era? Will safety signals scraped from internet inquiries and social media conversations be the next wave source of drug safety concerns? A special subcommittee of FDA’s Science Board released a report at the beginning of May that advises FDA to pay attention to the opportunities from new media for picking up drug safety signals.
McClellan Leads the Way to New Postmarketing World
Midway through the 2007 Congressional debate over new drug safety controls, Mark McClellan, MD, is emerging as a figure with the credentials, credibility and fund-raising capability to make the establishment of a public-private partnership for post-marketing surveillance a reality. Big Pharma better hope that McClellan is ultimately successful. If ever there was a time when a new, authoritative voice was needed to provide clarity to postmarketing safety issues, it is now.
Silicon Genetics
Now that there is a growing number of labs producing gene expression data, researchers find themselves in need of better software tools to make sense of the data. So Silicon Genetics came out with {GeneSpring}, to allow complex comparisons among genes, allowing scientists to figure out, for example, what genes behave in similar ways.