FDA Wants to Know Drug Side-Effects by Google Search

Last month
 FDA officials met Google experts and the web was buzzing with speculation about the context of the discussion. Both FDA and Google have kept mum about the topic of discussion but one of the Google attendees is an expert in data mining and has published articles on using web searches by people to link side-effects to drugs. This led several pundits to claim that FDA is forming an alliance with Google to use the search engine giant’s resources to capture better
 pharmacovigilance information. Yahoo and
 Microsoft, before Google, have also invested in
 big data to evaluate its potential in knowing more about the benefits and side-effects of drugs using internet searches by patients. Internet searches are the norm in today’s disease management where people post their health status on their social media portals before they talk to their doctors, where patients share experiences in forums unfiltered by any moderation, where even physicians search internet for latest information on a disease and treatment options. Search engines store all meta data on the common topics being searched and use that to target information and advertisements to consumers. This information can potentially be shared with regulators to identify side-effects previously unknown to be associated with a given drug. However, the algorithms to use search engine data to predict side effects are in their infancy and it may be some time before they can be used beneficially. Social media data on the other hand
 holds greater potential in the near future to developers of tools to understand disease progression and outbreaks. Meanwhile, stay tuned for FDA’s interactions with internet search engine companies, Google and others.