Pharma Strategy Blog

This week offers a nice break in science topics on the blog and a chance to look at how technology can be used to monitor social media, physician and patient sentiments about drugs and various diseases in a practical way.  I've been interested in analysing trends in data since my undergraduate days when I created the first automated computerised football (soccer) notation system for looking at strategies and tactics employed by winning and losing teams.  

There's a LOT of blah blah talk about social media out there, in particular from self styled gurus and experts, which tends to make me tune out for the most part.  In my spare time (away from being immersed in preclinical and clinical data), what I'm really interested in is how mathematical algorithms can be applied to speech and words using modern computer techniques to extract feeling, tone and meaning from sentiments in meaningful ways.

After yesterday's 5 minute Lightening Talk at the Sentiments Analysis Symposium in New York hosted by Seth Grimes of Alta Plana, I received a few requests for the presentation, entitled "Next generation sentiment extraction: light at the end of the tunnel, but will it negate the need for human supervision?" 

So here it is for those interested:

Using Sentiment Analysis in Pharma and Biotech

View more presentations from maverickny.

The file is downloadable and I'm pleased to say that the quality is much better than reading it in Slideshare online, which may look a little fuzzy.  

I managed to do the brief presentation with 10 seconds to spare. There nothing worse than getting half way through and the buzzer goes before you get to the interesting bits!

If anyone wants any further information, please feel free to contact me. We have several interesting projects ongoing with sentiments analysis in oncology at the moment.

Next week normal service will resume and I will be busy reporting on hot science and research topics at the American Association of Cancer Research Meeting in DC, as they have kindly offered Pharma Strategy Blog a science blogger pass and an opportunity to bring new developments in science and cancer biology to life here. Watch this space!