Rui Zhang Awarded Grant for Dietary Supplement Research
Principal Investigator, Rui Zhang, PhD, received ~$3.1 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop an enriched knowledge base and translational informatics framework to examine the safety and efficacy of dietary supplements. This grant renews a previous research project where Dr. Zhang and his team developed dietary supplement terminology and generated hypotheses on potential drug-supplement interactions using biomedical literature.
The enriched dietary supplement knowledge base (eDISK) will draw on electronic health records (EHR), biomedical literature, and other multimodal data sources. The innovative translational informatics framework (iDISK-Mine) will facilitate dietary supplement research using generalizable AI/ML approaches on real-world multi-site EHR data. This will allow researchers to draw on scattered dietary supplement data to examine how patients (eg., depressive patient) use dietary supplements and to prevent their improper use.
The investigation team includes Dr. Kevin Lim (Medical School), Dr. Julian Wolfson (School of Public Health), Dr. Serguei Pakhomov and Dr. Jeffrey Bishop (College of Pharmacy), Dr. Steve Johnson (Institute for Health Informatics) and Dr. Hongfang Liu from the University of Texas at Houston.
Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wolfson co-lead the Innovative Methods & Data Science program in CLHSS.
