Chat rooms used to check drug safety
pharmafile | October 12, 2012 | News story | Medical Communications | Chat rooms, pharmacovigilance
Social media chatter on blogs, tweets and online forums is to be analysed to see whether such comments can help identify adverse drug reactions in advance of action by regulatory authorities.
Researchers from the University of Virginia and West Virginia University will look at thousands of pharma-related posts online to establish whether they help provide early-warning signals of problems with drugs on the market.
The US National Science Foundation has given a $130,000 grant to a team co-led by University of Virginia IT professor Ahmed Abbasi, to carry out the work.
They think freely-available information – such as complaints about the effects of medicines in internet chat rooms – could be both faster and more accurate than official reporting channels in providing feedback.
“The idea is for the FDA and other key stakeholders to get the initial signals earlier, allowing them to investigate leads sooner, and make the final pronouncements about adverse drug reactions,” Abbasi explained.
His team will be building on its own research, published in ACM Transactions on Information Systems, in which websites, blogs, forums and social networking sites from 2000 to early 2012 were monitored.
They identified hundreds of thousands of documents containing adverse drug reaction-related information, and suggest that some could be used to warn of problems years earlier than is possible at present.
However, around ten billion new tweets are produced every month and Abbasi conceded that information quality is an issue: one hypochondriac might produce dozens of unreliable reports of drug side effects, he said.
The researchers will use cutting-edge tools for analysing large amounts of data, and the resulting warning signals will be reviewed for ‘credibility, plausibility and likelihood’ by pharma industry experts along with professors from West Virginia University’s schools of pharmacy and medicine.
Pharmacovigilance is a hugely sensitive issue for an industry whose public perception is often less than favourable: in the summer GlaxoSmithKline was fined $3 billion, in part for under-reporting safety data.
Roche also incurred the wrath of regulators in June after it emerged that 80,000 incidents – including 15,161 patient deaths – involving its medicines in the US were not evaluated to see whether they should have been reported as adverse reactions to European Union authorities.
Adam Hill
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