Pharmacy Daily | FDA tracks AEs on Google

Adverse events are normally tracked by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) via adverse events submitted through voluntary and mandatory reports to its FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS), but last month, representatives from the FDA and search giant Google met to discuss “adverse event trending”. The FDA is exploring all possible means of sourcing adverse events (AEs) including social media in conjunction with search engine technologies such as Google and Yahoo, according to Bloomberg. The FDA conducted a teleconference with a Google staffer called Evgeniy Gabrilovich, who previously worked with Yahoo where he wrote a paper that used search data to identify suspected adverse reactions. The paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research, analysed 176 million Yahoo queries during 2010 and showed up reactions “that have so far eluded discovery by the existing mechanisms”. The FDA currently receives more than a million adverse drug reaction reports per year, with the sheer volume making it sometimes slow to detect safety issues. The FDA is also looking at other avenues, with a staffer last year co-authoring a paper about monitoring drug safety via Twitter.

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