A Platform for the Study of Drug Interactions and Adverse Effects Prediction

This article reports on the development of a Web platform for the study of Adverse Drug Events (ADEs). The platform is able to import ADE episodes from official Web sites, like OpenFDA, analyse the chemistry of the drugs involved, together with patient data, and produce a potential explanation based on the drugs interactions. Each study uses chemical knowledge to enrich the information on the molecules involved in the episodes. Data Mining is then used to construct models that can help in the explanation of the ADE occurrence and to predict future events. This paper reports on the Web portal developed and the Data Mining experiments conducted to evaluate the quality, and potential explanations of the forecasted adverse reactions, using real reports of drug administration and the subsequent adverse events. The results showed that it was possible to predict the outcomes of ADEs based on the structure of the molecules of the drugs involved and the data collected from real reports of drug administration up to an accuracy of 79%, while also predicting, with high accuracy, the severity of events where the outcome is the death of the patient (with a precision of 98.9%). The platform provides a less expensive and more accurate way of predicting adverse drug reactions compared to traditional methods. This study highlights the importance of understanding drug interactions at a molecular level and the usefulness of utilising Data Mining techniques in predicting ADEs.