• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, September 11, 2014

Social media provides a treasure trove of self-reported information about pretty much every aspect of human existence, which researchers and forecasters are exploiting to forecast everything from disease outbreaks to economic growth to movie box office returns. Now regulators from the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency are studying how to use social media data to identify possibly dangerous drug side effects and interactions.

According to the MHRA the new three-year project, called “WEB-RADR,” brings together regulators with academics to “investigate the potential for publicly available social media data for identifying potential drug safety issues.” The agency emphasized that all the information will be anonymized in order to protect individual privacy.

MHRA vigilance and risk management group manager Mick Foy stated that “the recent growth of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and the many specialist sites and blogs has given rise to many people sharing their medical experiences publicly on the internet. Such data sharing, if properly harnessed, could provide an extremely valuable source of information for monitoring the safety of medicines after they have been licensed.”

Part of the project includes development of a new mobile app for reporting drug side effects and interactions by doctors, which will also be able to push notifications of health alerts on drug side effects to health professionals and patients.  

The project is being funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private initiative whose backers include the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations.

Of course this isn’t the first major health-related study mining social media data. Last year, for example, the National Institutes of Health funded a study by the University of California, San Diego using Twitter as a tool for monitoring major depressive disorder in the general population. The NIH grant states that the study will explore how Twitter may be used as an adjunct to the traditional large-scale telephone surveys as a means of tracking the incidence of depression over time.