Improving Detection of Arrhythmia Drug-Drug Interactions in Pharmacovigilance Data through the Implementation of Similarity-Based Modeling

Identification of Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) is a significant challenge during drug development and clinical practice. DDIs are responsible for many adverse drug effects (ADEs), decreasing patient quality of life and causing higher care expenses. DDIs are not systematically evaluated in pre-clinical or clinical trials and so the FDA U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on post-marketing surveillance to monitor patient safety. However, existing pharmacovigilance algorithms show poor performance for detecting DDIs exhibiting prohibitively high false positive rates. Alternatively, methods based on chemical structure and pharmacological similarity have shown promise in adverse drug event detection. We hypothesize that the use of chemical biology data in a post hoc analysis of pharmacovigilance results will significantly improve the detection of dangerous interactions. Our model integrates a reference standard of DDIs known to cause arrhythmias with drug similarity data. To compare similarity between drugs we used chemical structure (both 2D and 3D molecular structure), adverse drug side effects, chemogenomic targets, drug indication classes, and known drug-drug interactions. We evaluated the method on external reference standards. Our results showed an enhancement of sensitivity, specificity and precision in different top positions with the use of similarity measures to rank the candidates extracted from pharmacovigilance data. For the top 100 DDI candidates, similarity-based modeling yielded close to twofold precision enhancement compared to the proportional reporting ratio (PRR). Moreover, the method helps in the DDI decision making through the identification of the DDI in the reference standard that generated the candidate.