Abstractor - What's next?

Answer: A searchable front end onto the Pfizer clinical trial data

It’s been a busy few weeks since we launched Abstractor. For those of you just reading about it for the first time, head over to my last Substack article where I introduced this searchable front end onto the Pfizer pdf documents.

Abstractor - A searchable front end onto the Pfizer documents they didn't want you to see

In the time we’ve been running, we’ve fixed a few bugs, added a tab that searches FOIA requests to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia, listened to feedback and had to update the server due to increased load!

This month, in particular, was busy with Abstractor exceeding our plan’s server hour allocation and thanks to some generous donations (thanks!) and an anonymous sponsor (big thanks!!), we have been able to upgrade and continue (more later).

Top 10 Most Popular Queries with Abstractor’s PDF Keyword Finder

The latest development efforts behind the scenes have been focused on getting the clinical trial data (SaS XML format) into MySQL so that we can provide a front end and query it. Having experience with VAERS and accessing that through the CDC Wonder interface, I think we’ll do something similar.

How you can help

What we really want at this stage though are inputs from people who understand clinical trial data and/or want to query the Pfizer clinical trial database.

We are a small group of data scientists, so we know data and how to build front ends, but domain knowledge is something we need input on. If you have knowledge of clinical trial databases and/or you have a keen interest to query the data, we’d like to hear from you.

We’re already working with some experienced clinical professionals and this is an excellent opportunity for you to get involved in shaping the future of Abstractor.

So if you’d like to get involved, please send a short email with ‘Abstractor: Trial Database’ in the subject line and a few words about your interest and experience to the following email address pfizerdox@protonmail.com and we’ll get back to you.

We’re looking for a few people to join the team and help with design and testing. We can do the coding - don’t worry!

Donations

Finally, many thanks to everyone who has made a donation. We work as volunteers on the project but have server costs to meet each month. So please consider making a small (monthly) donation either with coffee (we really love coffee!) or by becoming a paid subscriber to this substack. It helps a lot.