Introduction Discovery of new adverse drug events (ADEs) in the post-approval period is an important goal of the health system. Data mining methods that can transform data into meaningful knowledge to inform patient safety have proven to be essential. New opportunities have emerged to harness data sources that have not been used within the traditional framework. This article provides an overview of recent methodological innovations and data sources used in support of ADE discovery and analysis.

Signal detection algorithms (SDAs) are recognized as vital tools in pharmacovigilance. However, their performance characteristics are generally unknown. By leveraging a unique gold standard recently made public by the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership and by conducting a unique systematic evaluation, we provide new insights into the diagnostic potential and characteristics of SDAs routinely applied to FDAs adverse event reporting system. We find that SDAs can attain reasonable predictive accuracy in signaling adverse events. Two performance classes emerge, indicating that the class of approaches addressing confounding and masking effects benefits safety surveillance. Our study shows that not all events are equally detectable, suggesting that specific events might be monitored more effectively through other sources. We provide performance guidelines for several operating scenarios to inform the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity for specific use cases. We also propose an approach and apply it to identify optimal signaling thresholds given specific misclassification tolerances.

Background Drugedrug interactions (DDIs) are responsible for many serious adverse events; their detection is crucial for patient safety but is very challenging. Currently, the US Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical companies are showing great interest in the development of improved tools for identifying DDIs. Methods We present a new methodology applicable on a large scale that identifies novel DDIs based on molecular structural similarity to drugs involved in established DDIs. The underlying assumption is that if drug A and drug B interact to produce a specific biological effect, then drugs similar to drug A (or drug B) are likely to interact with drug B (or drug A) to produce the same effect. DrugBank was used as a resource for collecting 9454 established DDIs. The structural similarity of all pairs of drugs in DrugBank was computed to identify DDI candidates. Results The methodology was evaluated using as a gold standard the interactions retrieved from the initial DrugBank database. Results demonstrated an overall sensitivity of 0.68, specificity of 0.96, and precision of 0.26. Additionally, the methodology was also evaluated in an independent test using the Micromedex/Drugdex database. Conclusion The proposed methodology is simple, efficient, allows the investigation of large numbers of drugs, and helps highlight the etiology of DDI. A database of 58 403 predicted DDIs with structural evidence is provided as an open resource for investigators seeking to analyze DDIs.

BackgroundMulti-item adverse drug event (ADE) associations are associations relating multiple drugs to possibly multiple adverse events. The current standard in pharmacovigilance is bivariate association analysis, where each single drug-adverse effect combination is studied separately. The importance and difficulty in the detection of multi-item ADE associations was noted in several prominent pharmacovigilance studies. In this paper we examine the application of a well established data mining method known as association rule mining, which we tailored to the above problem, and demonstrate its value. The method was applied to the FDAs spontaneous adverse event reporting system (AERS) with minimal restrictions and expectations on its output, an experiment that has not been previously done on the scale and generality proposed in this work.ResultsBased on a set of 162,744 reports of suspected ADEs reported to AERS and published in the year 2008, our method identified 1167 multi-item ADE associations. A taxonomy that characterizes the associations was developed based on a representative sample. A significant number (67% of the total) of potential multi-item ADE associations identified were characterized and clinically validated by a domain expert as previously recognized ADE associations. Several potentially novel ADEs were also identified. A smaller proportion (4%) of associations were characterized and validated as known drug-drug interactions.ConclusionsOur findings demonstrate that multi-item ADEs are present and can be extracted from the FDA’s adverse effect reporting system using our methodology, suggesting that our method is a valid approach for the initial identification of multi-item ADEs. The study also revealed several limitations and challenges that can be attributed to both the method and quality of data.

It is feasible to identify DDI signals and estimate the rate of adverse events among patients on drug combinations, directly from clinical text; this could have utility in prioritizing drug interaction surveillance as well as in clinical decision support.