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

Journal: Database : the journal of biological databases and curation
Published Date:

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.

Authors

  • Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez
    Health Language Processing Center, Institute for Biomedical Informatics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
  • Martin Krallinger
    Structural Computational Biology Group, Structural Biology and BioComputing Programme, Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, Madrid, Spain.
  • Monica Muñoz
    Division of Pharmacovigilance, Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology, Center of Drug Evaluation and Research, FDA, 10903 New Hampshire Ave, Silver Spring, MD 20993, USA.
  • Raul Rodriguez-Esteban
    Roche Pharmaceutical Research and Early Development, pRED Informatics, Roche Innovation Center, Basel, Switzerland.
  • Ozlem Uzuner
    Department of Information Studies, University at Albany, SUNY. Albany, NY.
  • Lynette Hirschman
    The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA, USA lynette@mitre.org.