Challenges and opportunities for mining adverse drug reactions: perspectives from pharma, regulatory agencies, healthcare providers and consumers

Abstract

Monitoring drug safety is a central concern throughout the drug life cycle. Information about toxicity and adverse events is generated at every stage of this life cycle, and stakeholders have a strong interest in applying text mining and artificial intelligence (AI) methods to manage the ever-increasing volume of this information. Recognizing the importance of these applications and the role of challenge evaluations to drive progress in text mining, the organizers of BioCreative VII (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction in Biology) convened a panel of experts to explore ‘Challenges in Mining Drug Adverse Reactions’. This article is an outgrowth of the panel; each panelist has highlighted specific text mining application(s), based on their research and their experiences in organizing text mining challenge evaluations. While these highlighted applications only sample the complexity of this problem space, they reveal both opportunities and challenges for text mining to aid in the complex process of drug discovery, testing, marketing and post-market surveillance. Stakeholders are eager to embrace natural language processing and AI tools to help in this process, provided that these tools can be demonstrated to add value to stakeholder workflows. This creates an opportunity for the BioCreative community to work in partnership with regulatory agencies, pharma and the text mining community to identify next steps for future challenge evaluations.

Social Media Posts on Statins: What Can We Learn About Patient Experiences and Perspectives?

“…Social media posts have been shown to be a useful source of information on medication adverse events. 13 Specifically, previous research uncovered the adverse events most commonly mentioned in association with statins in Twitter (now X) 6 , 11 , 14 , 15 and Facebook 16 These analyses show agreement with more traditional sources of data such as regulatory data, electronic health records, 14 and the published literature. 6 …”

Layered Double Hydroxides: Recent Progress and Promising Perspectives Toward Biomedical Applications

“…Typically, the research and development process of biomaterials can be divided into five stages: basic experimental research, pre‐clinical in vivo evaluation, pre‐clinical research, clinical trials, and post‐market monitoring. [ 314 , 315 , 316 , 317 , 318 ] Generally, the entire research and development process of biomaterials is a lengthy process that requires strict safety and efficacy at each stage, and compliance with laws, regulations, and ethical requirements. [ 319 , 320 , 321 , 322 , 323 , 324 , 325 , 326 , 327 , 328 ] Based on the rigorous process, some biomaterials have been eliminated due to safety issues or insufficient efficacy.…”

The Role of Social Media for Identifying Adverse Drug Events Data in Pharmacovigilance: Protocol for a Scoping Review

“…It was believed that social media data could be used to identify new signals or signals earlier than conventional methods [ 12 ]. To cope with the enormous amounts of text-based information posted on social media, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) methods for automatic detection of mentions are continually being developed [ 13 , 14 ]. These methods have to overcome many challenges, for instance, the language in social media is highly informal, and user-expressed concepts are often nontechnical, descriptive, and challenging to extract [ 15 , 16 ].…”

“…These methods have to overcome many challenges, for instance, the language in social media is highly informal, and user-expressed concepts are often nontechnical, descriptive, and challenging to extract [ 15 , 16 ]. NLP has been particularly instrumental in overcoming some of the barriers to identify adverse event mentions [ 13 , 14 ]. However, while the technological methods have advanced, the use of social media in identifying adverse events has not been sufficiently demonstrated, and thus, the debate as to whether (and if so, how) social media can enhance pharmacovigilance is still not resolved.…”