Briefs

The Food and Drug Administration has signed a two-year cooperative R&D agreement with Lincoln Technologies Inc. of Wellesley Hills, Mass., to develop new data-mining techniques for the agency�s Adverse Events Reporting System.

The adverse-events database already contains more than 2 million reports of patients� reactions to drugs and biologics. More than 300,000 new reports are added annually, said Paul J. Seligman, director of the Office of Pharmacoepidemiology and Statistical Science in FDA�s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

FDA investigators need the data-mining tools to spot trends in the data and to study complex drug interactions. The adverse-events system, using an Oracle Corp. database, stores ages and genders of patients but not their names or other identifying data, Seligman said.

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