Dima Qato, Hygeia Centennial Chair at the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, has received a $50,000 Collaborative Research Planning Award from the USC Office of Research and Innovation. The grant supports an initiative combining data-driven approaches with population-based claims data to help prevent adverse drug interactions. The project blends the expertise of the Mann School, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
The research is vital, Qato notes, because increasing polypharmacy—the use of multiple medications at once—has become a leading cause of preventable injuries and fatalities nationwide. “Despite this rise, though, existing drug safety monitoring still focuses on the side effects of individual medications,” she says. “The role of drug-to-drug interactions is being overlooked—putting patients at risk.”
Qato, who also directs the Mann School’s Program on Medicines and Public Health, is working with co-principal investigators Nicholas Tatonetti of Cedars-Sinai’s Department of Computational Biomedicine and Sze-Chuan Suen, associate professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at USC Viterbi. They are blending their expertise to employ AI, machine learning and big data techniques to reveal dangerous polypharmacy interactions that have previously gone undetected—especially in such vulnerable populations as children and older adults.
Based on this project’s results, the team will apply for funding from the National Institutes of Health to further their efforts in preventing adverse drug events. “Our research is designed to fundamentally enhance the way drug safety surveillance is conducted,” Qato says.
The USC Collaborative Research Planning Award supports the creation of multidisciplinary research teams, bringing together several disciplines to provide a broad range of expertise and generate creative solutions to solve real-world problems.