The SIDER database of drugs and side effects

Abstract

Unwanted side effects of drugs are a burden on patients and a severe impediment in the development of new drugs. At the same time, adverse drug reactions (ADRs) recorded during clinical trials are an important source of human phenotypic data. It is therefore essential to combine data on drugs, targets and side effects into a more complete picture of the therapeutic mechanism of actions of drugs and the ways in which they cause adverse reactions. To this end, we have created the SIDER ('Side Effect Resource', http://sideeffects.embl.de) database of drugs and ADRs. The current release, SIDER 4, contains data on 1430 drugs, 5880 ADRs and 140 064 drug-ADR pairs, which is an increase of 40% compared to the previous version. For more fine-grained analyses, we extracted the frequency with which side effects occur from the package inserts. This information is available for 39% of drug-ADR pairs, 19% of which can be compared to the frequency under placebo treatment. SIDER furthermore contains a data set of drug indications, extracted from the package inserts using Natural Language Processing. These drug indications are used to reduce the rate of false positives by identifying medical terms that do not correspond to ADRs.

Figure 1.

Navigating the SIDER website. Users can search for drugs to get an overview of its ADR (A). Clicking on cells in the table of labels and ADRs takes the user to a separate page (B) where they can inspect all mentions of the ADR.

Figure 2.

Data content of SIDER. For SIDER versions 1, 2 and 4 the distribution of (A) drugs per ADR and (B) ADRs per drug is shown. These distributions do not follow a power law. Note that the current version of SIDER is the third release, but is designated SIDER 4 because it is based on the same set of chemicals as STITCH 4.