This year the theme of the conference was “Health + Social 4.0”.
The conference is organized by the Portuguese MS Society and I had the opportunity to present Gregory to the people he is meant to serve.
This was a big milestone that was made possible by the Portuguese MS Society, https://spem.pt/.
I wanted to make the most of this opportunity and bring something extra to the participants.
Introducing Metabase
If you want to explore data and share it with a team, Metabase is the tool for you. Metabase connects to any data source you can think of and allows anyone to build dashboards with an intuitive interface.
We are using it for two objectives. First, Metabase charts are used in some of the pages of the Observatory. One example is the page for Ocrevus, also known as Ocrelizumab.
This page now features two interactive charts where you can see the number of articles found with “ocrelizumab” in the title and how many of them seem to be relevant for People with Multiple Sclerosis and their quality of life.
Visitors can also download an Excel or JSON file with the data of each chart.
Second, with Metabase we can now give people an improved access to the database. Doctors and Researchers can navigate to Metabase.Gregory-ms.com and login to build their own charts and configure automatic updates and email notifications.
This is an addition and not a replacement for the weekly digest of relevant research.
We are being cautious with the number of user accounts for Metabase to make sure the server can handle the number of requests. We gave away 10 accounts at the conference and there are another 10 available to anyone who shows interest.
If you would like one send an email to [email protected].
Revisiting the road map
Gregory as been doing a good job in collecting research and sending it to subscribers, and the algorithm keeps improving as the database grows.
It’s now time to level up and focus more on Clinical Trials. We have 3 priorities for 2022.
- Spread the word about clinical trials in Portugal ⬜️
- Inform of related clinical trials 🟡
- Track acceptance of new therapies and drugs ⬜️
We already have some information on trials, but are unable to inform our stakeholders on which are recruiting and which are underway.
Even the information we have right now is of little use, it merely aggregates and filters MS Trials. A worthy goal would be to segment this list by country. We will be focusing on trials taking place in Portugal for the next year and see how far we can go.
The road ahead is hard
In Portugal, clinical trials are posted in the Registo Nacional de Estudo Clínicos, and at the moment we have no way to index the information on multiple sclerosis.
The European Medicine Agency is planning to launch the Clinical Trials Information System (CTIS) in January 2022. I haven’t had the time to focus on the documentation available, but I hope this new system will allow Gregory to index information.
As usual, I am open to your questions and suggestions. Feel free to reach out by emailing me or through twitter. You can use my personal account (@brunoamaral), or @GregoryMS_.
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