A pipeline to extract drug-adverse event pairs from multiple data sources

BACKGROUND: Pharmacovigilance aims to uncover and understand harmful side-effects of drugs, termed adverse events (AEs). Although the current process of pharmacovigilance is very systematic, the increasing amount of information available in specialized health-related websites as well as the exponential growth in medical literature presents a unique opportunity to supplement traditional adverse event gathering mechanisms with new-age ones. METHOD: We present a semi-automated pipeline to extract associations between drugs and side effects from traditional structured adverse event databases, enhanced by potential drug-adverse event pairs mined from user-comments from health-related websites and MEDLINE abstracts. The pipeline was tested using a set of 12 drugs representative of two previous studies of adverse event extraction from health-related websites and MEDLINE abstracts. RESULTS: Testing the pipeline shows that mining non-traditional sources helps substantiate the adverse event databases. The non-traditional sources not only contain the known AEs, but also suggest some unreported AEs for drugs which can then be analyzed further. CONCLUSION: A semi-automated pipeline to extract the AE pairs from adverse event databases as well as potential AE pairs from non-traditional sources such as text from MEDLINE abstracts and user-comments from health-related websites is presented.