Internet Searches Could Help the FDA Uncover Previously Unknown Drug Adverse Events

Searching for the side effects associated with a particular drug could help the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) learn more about the adverse events caused by medications, which could lead to better warnings on products.

The FDA spoke with a senior Google researcher on June 9 about how the search engine could help the agency find previously unknown side effects of medications. FDA spokesman Chris Kelly told BloombergBusiness that the meeting was an introduction and a chance “for the agency to begin a discussion on how we might collaborate with Google on identifying adverse event data, using Google’s technologies and data.”

Senior Google staff research scientist Evgeniy Gabrilovich specializes in data mining and is a former Yahoo employee. Gabrilovich co-authored a paper two years ago that utilized Yahoo search data to identify suspected drug reactions. Based on 176 million Yahoo queries in 2010, the analysis demonstrated how search engines can identify drug reactions “that have so far eluded discovery by the existing mechanisms,” Gabrilovich wrote in the paper that was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research. BloombergBusiness obtained a copy of the report.

The way the FDA tracks adverse events has gone relatively unchanged since the late 1990s. The agency receives upwards of a million reports of adverse drug reactions each year. The FDA has tried to simplify the process of accessing the data, but critics say the system is probably missing many of the adverse events, and that the system can be slow to detect safety issues, BloombergBusiness reports.

Searching the Internet for drug reactions is not a new thing. “If you have the right technology to connect the dots, then you can see problems very, very early on,” Ido Hadari, chief executive of Treato, which scans patient forums and other online postings, explained to BloombergBusiness. He wouldn’t comment on whether Treato is talking with the FDA.

The FDA announced last month that it was collaborating with PatientsLikeMe.com, an online patient network. Last year, an FDA researcher co-wrote a paper about monitoring drug safety on Twitter. The online sleuthing seems to be paying off, too. Distinguished scientist and managing director at Microsoft’s research arm, Eric Horvitz, published a paper in 2013 with other researchers from Microsoft and Stanford University that revealed Web search data could have uncloaked the serious adverse reactions between Paxil, an antidepressant, and the cholesterol-lowering drug Pravastatin. The combination of drugs can cause hyperglycemia, BloombergBusiness reports.

The team concluded that people who searched for Paxil and Pravastatin over a 12-month period were more likely to search for terms related to high blood sugar including diabetes and dry mouth.

The analysis of millions of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing searches were from 2010, a year before the interaction was made known to the public, according to BloombergBusiness. The study results were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

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