A new course offered by IndianaUniversity's School of Informatics and Computing will offer students the opportunity to use real clinical trial data to practice advanced analysis.
The course will be a four-week summer class, offered to students in the data science master's degree program.
The Bloomington, Ind.-based university partnered with Eli Lilly and Co., a pharmaceutical company based in Indianapolis, to provide the real, anonymized data for the course. Data comes from human participants in trials testing the safety of potential new drugs.
The clinical trial data will undergo a "rigorous de-identification process" before students can access it, according to a university news release. Additionally, guidelines will indicate how the data can be used and where it can be stored.
"Our goal is for students to gain a better understanding of the overall drug development process, and specifically the human clinical trial phases," said Sara Bigelow, a clinical data associate at Eli Lilly. She is the lead collaborator in the course with IndianaUniversity, and graduated from the data science program. "This includes gaining knowledge on the data side of the process — where the data comes from, where it goes, how it's used and why it's so important not only to clinical trial research but also the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. Another key takeaway will be awareness about the privacy process involved in working with patient data."
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