title: Gathering and exploring scientific knowledge in pharmacovigilance.
abstract: Pharmacovigilance plays a key role in the healthcare domain through the assessment, monitoring and discovery of interactions amongst drugs and their effects in the human organism. However, technological advances in this field have been slowing down over the last decade due to miscellaneous legal, ethical and methodological constraints. Pharmaceutical companies started to realize that collaborative and integrative approaches boost current drug research and development processes. Hence, new strategies are required to connect researchers, datasets, biomedical knowledge and analysis algorithms, allowing them to fully exploit the true value behind state-of-the-art pharmacovigilance efforts. This manuscript introduces a new platform directed towards pharmacovigilance knowledge providers. This system, based on a service-oriented architecture, adopts a plugin-based approach to solve fundamental pharmacovigilance software challenges. With the wealth of collected clinical and pharmaceutical data, it is now possible to connect knowledge providers' analysis and exploration algorithms with real data. As a result, new strategies allow a faster identification of high-risk interactions between marketed drugs and adverse events, and enable the automated uncovering of scientific evidence behind them. With this architecture, the pharmacovigilance field has a new platform to coordinate large-scale drug evaluation efforts in a unique ecosystem, publicly available at http://bioinformatics.ua.pt/euadr/.
authors.affiliation: DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: Pedro
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Lopes
authors.affiliation: DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: Tiago
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nunes
authors.affiliation: DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Campos
authors.affiliation: Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Laura Ines
authors.initials: LI
authors.lastname: Furlong
authors.affiliation: Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bauer-Mehren
authors.affiliation: Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Ferran
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Sanz
authors.affiliation: Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Maria Carmen
authors.initials: MC
authors.lastname: Carrascosa
authors.affiliation: Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), IMIM Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Jordi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mestres
authors.affiliation: Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kors
authors.affiliation: Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Bharat
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Singh
authors.affiliation: Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: van Mulligen
authors.affiliation: Erasmus University Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Johan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Van der Lei
authors.affiliation: LESIM-ISPED, Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France.
authors.forename: Gayo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Diallo
authors.affiliation: LESIM-ISPED, Université de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France ; LERTIM, EA 3283, Faculté de Médecine, Université de Aix-Marseille, Marseille, France.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Avillach
authors.affiliation: AstraZeneca, Molndal, Sweden.
authors.forename: Ernst
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ahlberg
authors.affiliation: AstraZeneca, Molndal, Sweden.
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Boyer
authors.affiliation: Synapse Research Management Partners, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Diaz
authors.affiliation: DETI/IEETA, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
authors.forename: José Luís
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Oliveira
mesh_terms: D004347:Drug Interactions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D060735:Pharmacovigilance; D012984:Software