Abstract

Medicines are one of the most common public health interventions. In England, the NHS spends £20 billion on medicines however what is not known is how this money is spent and if medicines have the effects that are intended. One of the reasons for this is that medicines data is not routinely linked to health outcome data. Facilitated by Covid-19 some of these linkages are now possible. We have begun to show how these data can be used to inform on clincal- and cost-effective medicines use. Medicines development can also be data driven. Just like using routine health data linked to medicines, embedding reseach into routine clinical care and enhancing routine clinical phenotypes with multi-omic data can also lend itself to drug discovery. We will discuss data science approaches therefore to making and using medicines better.

Professor Sofat is a clinical pharmacologist who joined the University of Liverpool in 2022. Her research involves embedding research into routine clinical care with a focus on making and using medicines better. A current focus is leveraging data to understand disease and consequently, drug development and use of medicines – including genomic, multi-omic and real world data. As well as using publicly available resources, Reecha develops methods to create custom disease cohorts as well as investigating individualised treatment strategies. Reecha also chairs local and regional medicines committees, teaches pharmacology and therapeutics and delivers evidence-based medicines practice.

Reecha is Vice President (Clinical) of the British Pharmacological Society, as well as an Associate Director for the British Heart Foundation Data Science Centre and the Enhancing Cohorts Thematic lead.