Keeping pace in the age of innovation: The perspective of Dutch pharmaceutical science students on the position of machine learning training in an undergraduate curriculum.

Journal: Currents in pharmacy teaching & learning
PMID:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Over the years, approaches of the pharmaceutical industry to discover and develop drugs have changed rapidly due to new scientific trends. Among others, they have started to explore Machine Learning (ML), a subset of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a promising tool to generate new hypotheses regarding drug candidate selections for clinical trials and to predict adverse side effects. Despite these recent developments, the possibilities of ML in pharmaceutical sciences have so far hardly penetrated the training of pharmaceutical science students. Therefore, as part of an elective course, an introductory module on ML was developed at Utrecht University, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Authors

  • S Kidwai
    Division of Pharmacology, Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Electronic address: s.kidwai@uu.nl.
  • D Rojas-Velazquez
    Division of Pharmacology, Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Department of Data Science, Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Electronic address: e.d.rojasvelazquez@uu.nl.
  • A Lopez-Rincon
    Division of Pharmacology, Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Electronic address: a.lopezrincon@uu.nl.
  • A D Kraneveld
    Department of Neuroscience, Faculty of Science, VU university, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Electronic address: a.d.kraneveld@vu.nl.
  • D L Oberski
    Department of methodology and statistics, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Electronic address: d.l.oberski@uu.nl.
  • I Meijerman
    Division of Pharmacology, Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands. Electronic address: i.meijerman@uu.nl.