To further extend its pharmacovigilance radars, the FDA could soon start a collaboration with Google, the most important search engine on the internet. It is the hypothesis that prompted the American Food and Drug Administration to start negotiations with the Mountain View company for a possible alliance. The consideration that prompted the FDA executives to come forward is that many Internet users carry out daily searches on Google using the name of a drug and a certain series of symptoms as keywords. In some cases, however, the symptoms have no correlation with the indications of the medicine. For the American agency, the latter type of research could be related to the onset of side effects that the studies carried out before the launch had not identified.
The FDA initiative finds its raison d'être in some experiences of the recent past. Two years ago, for example, a study conducted by Microsoft demonstrated that it can be very useful to monitor searches made on web engines: thanks to an analysis that revealed how surfers often paired keywords related to a cholesterol-lowering drug with " antidepressant” and others that instead referred to hyperglycemia (blood sugar, diabetes, dry mouth, etc.), scholars had discovered that the combined use of pravastatin and paroxetine often led to hyperglycemia. (AS)
