# A Statistical Network Pharmacology Approach for Early Detection of Adverse Drug Events

> **NIH NIH R01** · OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY · 2022 · $307,130

## Abstract

A Statistical Network Pharmacology Approach for Early Detection of Adverse Drug Events
Project Summary
Early detection of adverse drug events (ADEs) in the post market phase is essential for protecting the public
from significant morbidity and mortality. The broad, long-term objectives of this project are to develop tools and
techniques that enable scientists to discover ADEs earlier and more reliably. Post-market spontaneous reporting
system (SRS) of ADEs serves as a cornerstone of pharmacovigilance and a series of drug safety signal detection
methods play an important role in providing drug safety insights. However, existing methods are developed to
generate safety signals for drugs with enough reports in SRS, but few methods can be used to generate signals
for newly approved drugs with few or even no safety reports in SRS. Also, few methods formulate the signal
detection problem under a rigorous hypothesis test framework, and no method exploits drug label and drug
property information. The goal of this project is to develop novel statistical learning methods to tackle those
challenges and detect ADEs in an early and actionable manner:
I. Develop an integrative label propagation framework to re-rank drug safety signals based on multiple drug
similarity networks for early detection of ADEs. We hypothesize that ADEs of newly approved drugs can be
detected in a timely fashion by incorporating multiple drug similarity networks. We will compute original drug
safety signals via common signal detection algorithms. Then, we will construct drug similarity networks based
on multiple data sources (e.g., chemical structures, targets, indications). Finally, we will generate enhanced drug
safety signals by propagating original signals on multiple drug similarity networks. The proposed method
enriches SRS with multiple drug similarity networks, alleviating issues of insufficient cases for newly approved
drugs and paving the way for early detection of ADEs.
II. Develop a Bayesian hypothesis testing approach which facilitates early detection of ADEs, while controlling
the false positive rate. We hypothesize that the proposed approach has increased power to detect ADEs
comparing with frequentist approaches, especially when the sample size is small (i.e., in a short period after a
new drug’s approval). Additionally, we hypothesize that the proposed approach is able to control the false positive
rate. Specifically, prior distribution of the new drug’s ADE risk can be estimated by using the existing drugs’ risks,
similarity scores between the new drug and the existing drugs, and drugs’ label information. Subsequently, the
prior distribution and the observed data can be utilized to derive the posterior probability of the null hypothesis,
which shall be used to detect ADE in a timely fashion.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10489247
- **Project number:** 5R01GM141279-02
- **Recipient organization:** OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Pengyue Zhang
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $307,130
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-09-15 → 2024-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10489247

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10489247, A Statistical Network Pharmacology Approach for Early Detection of Adverse Drug Events (5R01GM141279-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10489247. Licensed CC0.

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