Development of a Network-Based Signal Detection Tool: The COVID-19 Adversome in the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System

Introduction: The analysis of pharmacovigilance databases is crucial for the safety profiling of new and repurposed drugs, especially in the COVID-19 era. Traditional pharmacovigilance analyses–based on disproportionality approaches–cannot usually account for the complexity of spontaneous reports often with multiple concomitant drugs and events. We propose a network-based approach on co-reported events to help assessing disproportionalities and to effectively and timely identify disease-, comorbidity- and drug-related syndromes, especially in a rapidly changing low-resources environment such as that of COVID-19. Materials and Methods: Reports on medications administered for COVID-19 were extracted from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System quarterly data (January–September 2020) and queried for disproportionalities (Reporting Odds Ratio corrected for multiple comparisons). A network (the Adversome) was estimated considering events as nodes and conditional co-reporting as links. Communities of significantly co-reported events were identified. All data and scripts employed are available in a public repository. Results: Among the 7,082 COVID-19 reports extracted, the seven most frequently suspected drugs (remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, tocilizumab, lopinavir/ritonavir, sarilumab, and ethanol) have shown disproportionalities with 54 events. Of interest, myasthenia gravis with hydroxychloroquine, and cerebrovascular vein thrombosis with azithromycin. Automatic clustering identified 13 communities, including a methanol-related neurotoxicity associated with alcohol-based hand-sanitizers and a long QT/hepatotoxicity cluster associated with azithromycin, hydroxychloroquine and lopinavir-ritonavir interactions. Conclusion: Findings from the Adversome detect plausible new signals and iatrogenic syndromes. Our network approach complements traditional pharmacovigilance analyses, and may represent a more effective signal detection technique to guide clinical recommendations by regulators and specific follow-up confirmatory studies.