Gaining Information about Medicine from Patients' Words

Professor Satoko Hori, who has experience as a hospital pharmacist and in basic research on how drugs work in the body,

is currently exploring ways to broadly collect and utilize information from the patient's perspective.

This is because she believes that information for improving patient treatment is buried in the patients' daily lives.

We asked her about the significance of collecting drug-related data from information clusters that at first glance seem unrelated to medicine.

As of December 2022

Photo by: Keio University Faculty of Pharmacy

"I want to achieve treatment optimization." To achieve this, Professor Hori says that in addition to drug discovery, "drug optimization" is also important. After a drug is released and used, side effects and new efficacies may be discovered. The process of evolving a drug to be used more correctly and safely based on this new information is called "drug optimization."

In addition to data from blood tests and other examinations of diseases and physical conditions, the words spoken or written by patients and healthcare professionals (such as in medical records) are also an important source of information for understanding a drug's effects and side effects. However, analyzing large volumes of text by hand is difficult, and this information has not been fully utilized. Recently, research in "natural language processing," which enables machines to understand language, has advanced, making it possible to find drug optimization information from a large amount of text and use it in data analysis. Research is underway to take another step toward achieving treatment optimization.

Photo by: Keio University Faculty of Pharmacy

Professor Hori is also developing a model that uses natural language processing to identify information about drug side effects, treatment-related concerns, and patient QOL* from words posted by patients on social media and other platforms. This is to capture information that is difficult for healthcare professionals to obtain. Creating the training data to find descriptions related to drugs and treatments from a vast number of posts requires not only extensive pharmaceutical knowledge but also experience in communicating with patients.

Currently, she is exploring how to utilize this model through dialogue with patients, aiming to connect them to appropriate medical and social support at an early stage. "This research leverages the perspective of a pharmaceutical researcher who combines the expertise of a pharmacist with the research and practical skills to collaborate with researchers from different fields and with patients." Professor Hori states that treatment can only be optimized by addressing patients' symptoms and concerns and applying the findings to actual clinical practice.

Q. What is pharmacy to you?

A. Achieving treatment optimization through "drug optimization" after a drug has been developed.