One of our big interests in the McLaughlin Centre—and I want to thank R. Samuel McLaughlin for the generous donation that created our centre 12 years ago—is drug safety, efficacy, use, and communication. We're looking at drugs, their effectiveness, adverse health outcomes, and whether people follow the dosing regimes.
Looking at these large population-based databases, I mentioned this cohort of 35 million patients we're working with in the U.S. We can look at what factors affect outcomes that may determine whether a drug is effective for an individual patient. These would include factors like pre-existing health conditions. Renal disease, for example, might affect treatment of certain conditions, so might genetic characteristics or lifestyle factors. So we end up being able to define which patient will respond to which treatment, and which treatment may actually be risky. I was interviewed by a British clinical journal a month ago about our work in this area, and I think this is really going to be a way of the future. We will be looking at large databases where you understand everything about the patient's health profile, lifestyle, polypharmacy, comorbidity, and you work towards using that information to define more effective personalized medicine.