Visualizing drug side effects, their commonalities, and their uses.
On Hold
I had recently accepted an offer to start as a Business Analyst coop at a Pharma company and felt it would be a good idea to explore some medical data. My first stop here was to visualize some drug data. One of the most common issues that people have with drugs are their side effects so I felt it was a good place to begin.
To begin, I had to find a reliable source of data. With some searching, I stumbled across the SIDER database (found here: http://sideeffects.embl.de/).
SIDER contains information on marketed medicines and their recorded adverse drug reactions. The information is extracted from public documents and package inserts. The available information include side effect frequency, drug and side effect classifications as well as links to further information, for example drug–target relations.
The SIDER Side Effect Resource represents an effort to aggregate dispersed public information on side effects. To our knowledge, no such resource exist in machine-readable form despite the importance of research on drugs and their effects. The creation of this resource was motivated by the many requests for data that we received related to our paper (Campillos, Kuhn et al., Science, 2008, 321(5886):263-6.) on the utilization of side effects for drug target prediction. Inclusion of side effects as readouts for drug treatment should have many applications and we hope to be able to enhance the respective research with this resource.
Kuhn M, Letunic I, Jensen LJ, Bork P. The SIDER database of drugs and side effects. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015 Oct 19. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkv1075