A Bayesian method to detect drug-drug interaction using external information for spontaneous reporting system

Due to the insufficiency of safety assessments of clinical trials for drugs, further assessments are required for post-marketed drugs. In addition to adverse drug reactions (ADRs) induced by one drug, drug-drug interaction (DDI)-induced ADR should also be investigated. The spontaneous reporting system (SRS) is a powerful tool for evaluating the safety of drugs continually. In this study, we propose a novel Bayesian method for detecting potential DDIs in a database collected by the SRS. By applying a power prior, the proposed method can borrow information from similar drugs for a drug assessed DDI to increase sensitivity of detection. The proposed method can also adjust the amount of the information borrowed by tuning the parameters in power prior. In the simulation study, we demonstrate the aforementioned increase in sensitivity. Depending on the scenarios, approximately 20 points of sensitivity of the proposed method increase from an existing method to a maximum. We also indicate the possibility of early detection of potential DDIs by the proposed method through analysis of the database shared by the Food and Drug Administration. In conclusion, the proposed method has a higher sensitivity and a novel criterion to detect potential DDIs early, provided similar drugs have similar observed-expected ratios to the drug under assessment.