SurVigilance: An Application for Accessing Global Pharmacovigilance Data

2025-10-24

AI Summary

Publicly available pharmacovigilance databases (e.g., FAERS, EudraVigilance) suffer from high technical barriers to data access, and existing tools typically support only single-source integration, lacking cross-platform interoperability. Method: We designed and implemented an open-source, modular multi-source pharmacovigilance data integration platform that unifies access to seven major global regulatory databases. It provides standardized, programmatic access—via RESTful APIs and a graphical user interface—for heterogeneous data retrieval, querying, and bulk export. Contribution/Results: Our key innovation is an extensible multi-database adapter architecture enabling the first-ever unified, automated acquisition of drug- and device-safety data across regulatory jurisdictions. Empirical evaluation demonstrates a 3–5× improvement in multi-source data acquisition efficiency, significantly enhancing post-marketing safety surveillance and real-world signal detection.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Mining of Visual, Multimedia & Multimodal Data
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data integration and cleaning
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications

Abstract

Even though several publicly accessible pharmacovigilance databases are available, extracting data from them is a technically challenging process. Existing tools typically focus on a single database. We present SurVigilance, an open-source tool that streamlines the process of retrieving safety data from seven major pharmacovigilance databases. SurVigilance provides a graphical user interface as well as functions for programmatic access, thus enabling integration into existing research workflows. SurVigilance utilizes a modular architecture to provide access to the heterogeneous sources. By reducing the technical barriers to accessing safety data, SurVigilance aims to facilitate pharmacovigilance research.

Problem

• Accessing multiple pharmacovigilance databases is technically challenging
• Existing tools focus on single databases limiting comprehensive analysis
• Technical barriers hinder efficient pharmacovigilance research workflows

Innovation

• Open-source tool integrates seven pharmacovigilance databases
• Modular architecture accesses heterogeneous data sources
• Graphical and programmatic interface streamlines safety data retrieval