Towards Safer Drug Treatment
and Enhanced Patient Empowerment

Approach

Citizens are heterogeneous with regard to age, biological sex, gender, genetic constitution, and current or chronic disease status. A “one-size-fits-all” approach to drug therapy is therefore often inadequate. Even more so when treatments involve multiple medications for one or more diseases (polymedication). Polymedication and the lack of personalised therapies raise the incidents and severity of adverse drug reactions (ADRs). In Europe alone, approximately 197,000 annual deaths can be attributed to ADRs.

However, it is extremely challenging to take individual characteristics into account and to assign personalised drug treatment based on currently available risk assessment and dosing tools. While individual risk factors of drug therapy associated with ADRs and poor treatment outcomes are known, a systematic and holistic evaluation considering polypharmacy, multimorbidity, genetic variations as well as demographic and disease-related factors is still missing. Changing the state of the art and moving toward therapies that consider all of these factors would be highly beneficial for citizens as well as health care systems.

This is where SafePolyMed comes in: In order to assist physicians in accurately assessing individuals’ risk of experiencing ADRs, SafePolyMed seeks to develop a novel, evidence-based approach.

Through real-world data analysis of over 1 million individuals from national and international health record databases, SafePolyMed aims to build a well-defined risk score system. Genome-wide genetic information, demographic data, current and chronic health conditions as well as polypharmacy of individual patients will be taken into account to explore underlying causes of poor treatment outcomes and to define more personalised treatment plans.

Moreover, SafePolyMed will develop citizen-centred tools using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. By educating citizens and empowering them to participate in self-documenting their therapy, the project seeks to improve the communication between patients and physicians as well as equal access to innovative, sustainable, high-quality health-care across Europe.

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