The EU-ADR Web Platform: delivering advanced pharmacovigilance tools

Purpose Pharmacovigilance methods have advanced greatly during the last decades, making post-market drug assessment an essential drug evaluation component. These methods mainly rely on the use of spontaneous reporting systems and health information databases to collect expertise from huge amounts of real-world reports. The EU-ADR Web Platform was built to further facilitate accessing, monitoring and exploring these data, enabling an in-depth analysis of adverse drug reactions risks. Methods The EU-ADR Web Platform exploits the wealth of data collected within a large-scale European initiative, the EU-ADR project. Millions of electronic health records, provided by national health agencies, are mined for specific drug events, which are correlated with literature, protein and pathway data, resulting in a rich drug–event dataset. Next, advanced distributed computing methods are tailored to coordinate the execution of data-mining and statistical analysis tasks. This permits obtaining a ranked drug–event list, removing spurious entries and highlighting relationships with high risk potential. Results The EU-ADR Web Platform is an open workspace for the integrated analysis of pharmacovigilance datasets. Using this software, researchers can access a variety of tools provided by distinct partners in a single centralized environment. Besides performing standalone drug–event assessments, they can also control the pipeline for an improved batch analysis of custom datasets. Drug–event pairs can be substantiated and statistically analysed within the platform's innovative working environment. Conclusions A pioneering workspace that helps in explaining the biological path of adverse drug reactions was developed within the EU-ADR project consortium. This tool, targeted at the pharmacovigilance community, is available online at https://bioinformatics.ua.pt/euadr/. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.