Making Medicines Safer with Data Science

At Uppsala Monitoring Centre, we manage VigiBase, the world’s largest global database of reports of suspected side effects to medicines. We receive 10s of thousands of these reports every week. I will do a deep dive into two of the many challenges we face in analysing this data.

• Data science is an indispensable tool in the field of medicine safety
• Duplicate detection is a surprisingly difficult problem, requiring careful feature engineering
• NLP is a crucial tool for leveraging the rich free-text information in reports of suspected adverse side effects

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Jim W. Barrett – Senior Data Scientist | Uppsala Monitoring Centre

Jim Barrett is a senior data scientist at Uppsala Monitoring Centre, where he has worked on several projects applying sophisticated data science and machine learning techniques to make medicines safer globally. Prior to this, Jim was a software engineer in an AI research and development team at Klarna, and he holds a PhD in Astrophysics.