2024 – 2026
Funding: ANSM (Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé)
Title : A processing chain for social media data and its application to pharmacovigilance
Spontaneous reports of potentially drug-related adverse events, provided by healthcare professionals and patients, are the main source of information on the safety of drug use. Early research on social media in pharmacovigilance hypothesized that they could address the main limitation associated with under-reporting of adverse events, and bring signals to light earlier than with traditional data sources. The Limics team has carried out research into the use of social media for pharmacovigilance, as part of two projects funded by the French National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM): Vigi4Med and PHARES. These projects have resulted in the implementation of a processing chain comprising 4 modules: (1) extraction of messages from discussion forums, (2) annotation of drugs and adverse events in these messages, (3) signal detection and (4) graphical user interface.
The main objective of the PHARES 2 project is to make the processing chain implemented in the PHARES project available for routine use by ANSM staff carrying out signal detection tasks, in the context of activities associated with three identified needs
- Targeted monitoring of drugs of interest: Carry out proactive monitoring limited to a set of drugs of interest, such as the HPV vaccine, in order to detect signals of possible adverse effects.
- Integration of a misuse module: Finalize the integration of the misuse detection module, enabling routine evaluation of the detection of these situations.
- Consolidation of potential signals: Exploit this real-life data source to consolidate and cross-reference emerging signals with other pharmacovigilance detection sources, thereby reinforcing global surveillance capacity.