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Deal aims to extend value of UW’s drug-interaction database
If you are among the millions of people who take more than one prescription medication at a time, you may be benefiting from University of Washington research.
The School of Pharmacy’s Drug Interaction Database helps pharmaceutical companies predict how drugs will interact with each other. For almost 15 years, drug makers have been able to subscribe to the database to support their development processes.
Isabelle_Ragueneau-Majlessi
Later this year, clinicians will have access to that information and more, thanks to a new partnership between the UW and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries.
Teva developed DDI+, a cloud-based platform designed to complement existing electronic health records, giving physicians, pharmacists and other clinicians access to important drug-safety and -efficacy information for their patients. DDI+ will pull from Pharmacy’s database and synchronize with data extracted from other such information storehouses.
Healthcare providers will have the information needed to detect, prioritize and solve adverse drug reactions. The platform software can consider the individual patient’s vital signs, preexisting health issues, available genetic markers and other criteria against known drug interactions and other drug precautions.
If a potential drug-interaction problem exists, the provider will receive an alert to investigate further before prescribing.
Adverse drug reactions significantly affect patients' health and health costs. Each year, about 100,000 U.S. patients die, and 6 to 10 percent of hospitalizations stem from the phenomenon.
Moreover, as medicine becomes more personal and precise, potential adverse drug reactions grow and become more complicated.
Medications-drug interactions
“Adverse drug reactions are preventable, but personalized prescription is complex and requires a strong understanding of the various physiological processes involved,” said Isabelle Ragueneau-Majlessi, a clinical professor of pharmaceutics who oversees the UW’s drug database. “We need to do a better job translating research findings into actionable clinical information for healthcare providers. It is critical to understand the potential magnitude and cascading effects of drug interactions.”
School of Pharmacy researchers manually curate the largest collection of preclinical (in vitro) and clinical (in vivo) data, Ragueneau-Majlessi said. It is daunting but important work: integrating experimental conditions and results of drug-drug interactions, genetic differences in how drugs are metabolized, and organ-impairment studies from peer-reviewed journal articles as well as FDA New Drug Application Reviews.
CoMotion, the UW’s business-innovation and incubation center, helped to facilitate the partnership between the School of Pharmacy and Teva. Teva’s platform is deployed by Mediseen.