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The UK government intends to employ artificial intelligence systems in reviewing possible safety issues for Covid-19 vaccinations. The UK government plans to be ready for a mass vaccination campaign, whenever vaccines are available, by next Christmas. In order for this complex task to be done safely and effectively, those receiving the injections must be monitored for potential side effects – something best done with AI.
As coronavirus cases increase in the United States and around the world towards the winter season, scientists continue to work hard trying to deliver a vaccine as quickly as possible. A Covid-19 vaccine will be the result of long weeks of work and billions of dollars invested by governments around the world. However, early vaccines to be delivered to the public may be less effective and potentially have more side effects than a typical vaccine, due to the sheer speed at which the vaccines were produced.
Vaccine experts warn that in the spring, the vaccine situation could be quite confusing. There could easily be several vaccines to choose from, with different levels of effectiveness. Additionally, some of the vaccines could be suddenly withdrawn from the market due to the discovery of side effects. According to Dr. Gregory Poland via The New York Times, director of the Vaccine Research Group at the Mayo Clinic, many people have yet to understand the complexity and confusion that could occur by the first quarter of 2021. vaccines will have a substantial impact on how quickly the pandemic is contained and how quickly life returns to normal.
In order to better manage this potentially chaotic and confusing situation, the UK government is employing artificial intelligence algorithms to monitor the appearance of any side effects in those who initially receive the vaccines. The vaccines will have undergone extensive testing for both safety and efficacy by the time they are approved for general use by UK medical authorities. Despite this, the UK government is still operating with caution, aiming to catch signs of potentially harmful side effects as they appear.
According to Fortune, the UK’s leading medical regulatory body, the Medicines and Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency (MHRA), is concerned that current methods of identifying adverse drug reactions are not equipped to handle the impending situation. The system may be too slow to report potential security problems, overwhelmed by the number of events it needs to monitor.
In order to improve the efficiency of the “adverse event” reporting process, the MHRA uses artificial intelligence to automate many parts of the side effect detection and reporting system. The MHRA has donated approximately $ 2 million to Genpact, a business process outsourcing company. Genpact will be tasked with designing machine learning algorithms intended to collect side effect reports and identify any important safety issues. Machine learning algorithms are likely to be grading systems based on various characteristics of side effect reports, such as headache or fatigue. Healthcare professionals collect adverse event reports, gathering data such as patient age and gender, vaccine trade name, time and date of administration, symptoms, medical test results, and laboratory results. These reports are sent to agencies such as the MHRA who collect them in databases.
As reported by the Financial Times, the MHRA said that with typical vaccination campaigns there are 50.00 to 100,000 side effects for every 100 million vaccine doses, given a vaccination period of six to twelve months.
Genpact and MHRA’s use of machine learning algorithms to monitor vaccine side effects is just one example of a broader trend in using AI to test for possible drug side effects.
According to Healthcare It News, the MHRA says they are currently not anticipating any specific safety issues related to Covid-19 vaccines and that the vaccines will have the overall safety profile of other similar vaccines. The MHRA explained:
“The purpose of the AI tool we are introducing as part of our yellow card system is to help us quickly evaluate those reports after approval and not as part of the approval process. A COVID-19 vaccine will only be used once it has been shown to be safe and effective through robust clinical trials and approved for use by the licensing authority. “
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