Crystallizing Methods for Drug Effects

Yet another powerful example of the novel syntheses in which the aggregation of individual knowledge sources becomes a lot more than the sum of its parts: Using only the most well accepted and conventional of compedia of drug characteristics, Cami et al. demonstrate the power of integrative reasoning and systematic applications of "guilt-by-association" to predict accurately, across an interval of 5 years, hundreds of novel adverse events across more than 800 drugs. This performance is likely to improve further as they proceed to integrate healthcare data from electronic health records from consumers. The addition of molecular characterizations are also anticipated to provide further precision and individualization of these predictions.

These developments will be further accelerated if we can liberate data gathered with public funding for the public good.