DrugExBERT for Pharmacovigilance – A Novel Approach for Detecting Drug Experiences from User-Generated Content

Pharmaceutical companies have to maintain drug safety through pharmacovigilance systems by monitoring various sources of information about adverse drug experiences. Recently, user-generated content (UGC) has emerged as a valuable source of real-world drug experiences, posing new challenges due to its high volume and variety. We present DrugExBERT, a novel approach to extract adverse drug experiences (adverse reaction, lack of effect) and supportive drug experiences (effectiveness, intervention, indication, and off-label use) from UGC. To be able to verify the extracted drug experiences, DrugExBERT additionally provides explications in the form of UGC phrases that were critical for the extraction. In our evaluation, we demonstrate that DrugExBERT outperforms state-of-the-art pharmacovigilance approaches as well as ChatGPT on several performance measures and that DrugExBERT is data- and drug-agnostic. Thus, our novel approach can help pharmaceutical companies meet their legal obligations and ethical responsibility while ensuring patient safety and monitoring drug effectiveness

Drug Reviews: Cross-condition and Cross-source Analysis by Review Quantification Using Regional CNN-LSTM Models

Pharmaceutical drugs are usually rated by customers or patients (i.e. in a scale from 1 to 10). Often, they also give reviews or comments on the drug and its side effects. It is desirable to quantify the reviews to help analyze drug favorability in the market, in the absence of ratings. Since these reviews are in the form of text, we should use lexical methods for the analysis. The intent of this study was two-fold: First, to understand how better the efficiency will be if CNN-LSTM models are used to predict ratings or sentiment from reviews. These models are known to perform better than usual machine learning models in the case of textual data sequences. Second, how effective is it to migrate such information extraction models across different drug review data sets and across different disease conditions. Therefore three experiments were designed, first, an In-domain experiment where train and test data are from the same dataset. Two more experiments were conducted to examine the migration capability of models, namely cross-data source, where train and test are from different sources and cross-disease condition model training, where train and test data belong to different disease conditions in the same dataset. The experiments were evaluated using popular metrics such as RMSE, MAE, R2 and Pearson’s coefficient and the results showed that the proposed deep learning regression model works less successfully when compared to the machine learning sentiment extraction models in the literature, which were done on the same datasets. But, this study contributes to the existing literature in the quantity of research work done and in quality of the model and also suggests the future researchers on how to improve. This work also addressed the shortcomings in the literature by introducin