Artificial intelligence–enabled social media listening to inform early patient-focused drug development: perspectives on approaches and strategies

This article examines the opportunities and benefits of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled social media listening (SML) in assisting successful patient-focused drug development (PFDD). PFDD aims to incorporate the patient perspective to improve the quality, relevance, safety, and efficiency of drug development and evaluation. Gathering patient perspectives to support PFDD is aided by the participation of patient groups in communicating their treatment experiences, needs, preferences, and priorities through online platforms. SML is a method of gathering feedback directly from patients; however, distilling the quantity of data into actionable insights is challenging. AI-enabled methods, such as natural language processing (NLP), can facilitate data processing from SML studies. Herein, we describe a novel, trainable, AI-enabled, SML workflow that classifies posts made by patients or caregivers and uses NLP to provide data on their experiences. Our approach is an iterative process that balances human expert-led milestones and AI-enabled processes to support data preprocessing, patient and caregiver classification, and NLP methods to produce qualitative data. We explored the applicability of this workflow in 2 studies: 1 in patients with head and neck cancers and another in patients with esophageal cancer. Continuous refinement of AI-enabled algorithms was essential for collecting accurate and valuable results. This approach and workflow contribute to the establishment of well-defined standards of SML studies and advance the methodologic quality and rigor of researchers contributing to, conducting, and evaluating SML studies in a PFDD context.