Leveraging electronic health records to support chronic disease management: the need for temporal data views.

BACKGROUND: The ageing population worldwide is increasingly acquiring multiple chronic diseases. The complex management of chronic diseases could be improved with electronic health records (EHRs) tailored to chronic disease care, but most EHRs in use today do not adequately support longitudinal data management. A key aspect of chronic disease management is that it takes place over long periods, but the way that most EHRs display longitudinal data makes it difficult to trend changes over time and slows providers as they review each patient's unique course. METHODS: We present five clinical scenarios illustrating longitudinal data needs in complex chronic disease management. These scenarios may function as example cases for software development. OUTPUTS: For each scenario, we describe and illustrate improvements in temporal data views. Two potential solutions are visualisation for numerical data and disease-oriented text summaries for non-numerical data. CONCLUSIONS: We believe that development and widespread implementation of improved temporal data views in EHRs will improve the efficiency and quality of chronic disease management in primary care.

Discovering the anti-cancer potential of non-oncology drugs by systematic viability profiling.

Anti-cancer uses of non-oncology drugs have occasionally been found, but such discoveries have been serendipitous. We sought to create a public resource containing the growth inhibitory activity of 4,518 drugs tested across 578 human cancer cell lines. We used PRISM, a molecular barcoding method, to screen drugs against cell lines in pools. An unexpectedly large number of non-oncology drugs selectively inhibited subsets of cancer cell lines in a manner predictable from the cell lines' molecular features. Our findings include compounds that killed by inducing PDE3A-SLFN12 complex formation; vanadium-containing compounds whose killing depended on the sulfate transporter SLC26A2; the alcohol dependence drug disulfiram, which killed cells with low expression of metallothioneins; and the anti-inflammatory drug tepoxalin, which killed via the multi-drug resistance protein ABCB1. The PRISM drug repurposing resource (https://depmap.org/repurposing) is a starting point to develop new oncology therapeutics, and more rarely, for potential direct clinical translation.