Development of a production environment tool for the routine analysis of Drug-Event associations in the WHO drug safety database

The WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring in Uppsala (also known as the Uppsala Monitoring Centre) holds the world's largest database of spontaneously reported adverse drug reaction (ADR) incidents. The database currently consists of over 3 million reports from more than 70 countries all over the world and around 200,000 new reports are added each year. To help in the on-going analysis of this massive data set, a method for data mining referred to as IC analysis has been developed to screen for associations in large databases. This is a high profile project that has been reported on for example in Dagens Nyheter (14/5 1998) and Microsoft magazine (nr 2, 1998).

The data mining methods produced by our research and development team have been in routine use for some time and we are now ready to develop a user-friendly tool for our production environment. The new tool will be used, initially internally, for the routine data mining of the database. The development of the tool will demand an initial evaluation of current systems and future goals, a solution proposal including technical improvements and finally the implementation of the system as a part of our main production environment.


Tasks
- A brief documentation of current tool/system.
- A suggested solution in a production environment.
- On decision, implementation and documentation of the system.

The successful applicant should be a last year student of engineering (civilingenjörsprogram) or computer science with some experience of general programming and working with databases. Research and development has until now been carried out in a Linux environment using MySQL together with PHP and shell scripts. The aim is to move the result of the research to a production environment on a Windows system. Knowledge of both Windows and Linux is therefore required. All new development will be done with database scripts (Mimer) and the .NET programming language C#. The official language for the project is English.


For more information or to apply (include CV in English), please contact:

Magnus Wallberg, M. Sc. Engineering Physics
Manager