Finding Needles in the Haystack: Clinical Utility Score for Prioritisation (CUSP), an Automated Approach for Identifying Spontaneous Reports with the Highest Clinical Utility

Abstract

Introduction: Spontaneous reporting of adverse events has increased steadily over the past decades, and although this trend has contributed to improving post-marketing surveillance pharmacovigilance activities, the consequent amount of data generated is challenging to manually review during assessment, with each individual report requiring review by pharmacovigilance experts. This highlights a clear need for alternative or complementary methodologies to help prioritise review. Objective: Here, we aimed to develop and test an automated methodology, the Clinical Utility Score for Prioritisation (CUSP), to assist pharmacovigilance experts in prioritising clinical assessment of safety data to improve the rapidity of case series review when case volumes are large. Methods: The CUSP method was tested on a reference dataset of individual case safety reports (ICSRs) associated to five drug-event pairs that led to labelling changes. The selected drug-event pairs were of varying characteristics across the portfolio of GSK’s products. Results: The mean CUSP score for ‘key cases’ and ‘cases of low utility’ was 19.7 (median: 21; range: 7–27) and 17.3 (median: 19; range: 4–27), respectively. CUSP distribution for ‘key cases’ were skewed toward the higher range of scores compared with ‘all cases’. The overall performance across each individual drug-event pair varied considerably, showing higher predictive power for ‘key cases’ for three of the drug-event pairs (average CUSP between these three: 22.8; range: 22.5–23.0) and lesser power for the remaining two (average CUSP between these two: 17.6; range: 14.5–20.7). Conclusion: Although several tools have been developed to assess ICSR completeness and regulatory utility, this is the first attempt to successfully develop an automated clinical utility scoring system that can support the prioritisation of ICSRs for clinical review.