Indian pharma & clinical research organisations explore usage of ChatGPT potential in pharmacovigilance
Indian pharma and clinical research organisations are working to explore the potential usage of ChatGPT in pharmacovigilance, the science of monitoring the safety of medications.
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by the US-based OpenAI in November 2022. This tool can be used across the pharmaceutical industry and its related service providers. Artificial intelligence is already functioning in pharmacovigilance which is built on Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Recently, Microsoft and OpenAI teamed up to integrate the latter’s ChatGPT into the former’s platform technology. We see this to broaden the horizon as it will bring in efficiency in pharmacovigilance services to provide more meaningful patient safety, Dr Siva Kumar Buddha, consultant, pharmacovigilance, stated.
Pharmacovigilance is a complex and time-consuming process. It includes identifying potential adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and assessing its causality. One of the key challenges in pharmacovigilance is the sheer volume of data that needs to be analyzed. Traditional methods of data analysis, such as manual review of case reports, are labor-intensive and can be prone to errors. Now, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize pharmacovigilance by automating many of the tasks involved in data analysis. The model has been trained on a massive dataset of text, which enables it to understand and generate human-like text. This makes it well-suited for tasks such as natural language processing (NLP) and text mining, which are important in pharmacovigilance, he added.
An important use of ChatGPT in pharmacovigilance is the automated review of case reports. The model could be trained on a dataset of case reports and then used to identify potential ADRs. This would be a significant improvement over manual review, as it would be faster and more accurate. Additionally, ChatGPT could be used to extract relevant information from case reports, such as patient demographics and medication information, Dr Buddha told Pharmabiz.
Even more ChatGPT can be used in the assessment of causality. This is a key step in pharmacovigilance, as it is used to determine whether a particular ADR is caused by a medication. Further, ChatGPT could be used to extract relevant information, like the temporal relationship between the ADR, medication dose and the patient’s medical history. This information could then be used to assess causality using established algorithms, he said.
We have also seen that ChatGPT can be deployed in signal detection, which is the process of identifying potential safety concerns from a large dataset of case reports. By using NLP techniques, ChatGPT can analyze large text data, identify patterns and trends that may indicate a safety concern which aids to spot a potential ADRs early before it become a major problem.
Despite its potential, ChatGPT also has some limitations when it comes to pharmacovigilance. One being that as a language model, it is only as good as the data it has been trained on. If the training data is biased or incomplete, the model’s performance will be affected. Additionally, ChatGPT is not a medical expert and may not understand the nuances of medical terminology or the complexities of human physiology. Yet ChatGPT can revolutionize pharmacovigilance with its ability to understand and generate human-like text, making it ideal for tasks such as NLP and text mining, said Dr Buddha.
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