Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Will artificial intelligence chatbots replace clinical pharmacologists? An exploratory study in clinical practice

  • Research
  • Published:
European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Recently, there has been a growing interest in using ChatGPT for various applications in Medicine. We evaluated the interest of OpenAI chatbot (GPT 4.0) for drug information activities at Toulouse Pharmacovigilance Center.

Methods

Based on a series of 50 randomly selected questions sent to our pharmacovigilance center by healthcare professionals or patients, we compared the level of responses from the chatbot GPT 4.0 with those provided by specialists in pharmacovigilance.

Results

Chatbot answers were globally not acceptable. Responses to inquiries regarding the assessment of drug causality were not consistently precise or clinically meaningful.

Conclusion

The interest of chatbot assistance needs to be confirmed or rejected through further studies conducted in other pharmacovigilance centers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Availability of data and materials

Data are available upon reasonable request.

References

  1. Introducing ChatGPT. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt. Accessed 12 May 2023

  2. Ayers JW, Poliak A, Dredze M et al (2023) Comparing physician and artificial intelligence chatbot responses to patient questions posted to a public social media forum. JAMA Intern Med. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2023.1838

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Lee P, Bubeck S, Petro J (2023) Benefits, limits, and risks of GPT-4 as an AI chatbot for medicine. N Engl J Med 388:1233–1239. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMsr2214184

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Johnson M, Patel M, Phipps A et al (2023) The potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence in clinical pharmacology. CPT Pharmacomet Syst Pharmacol 12:279–284. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp4.12902

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. van der Lee M, Swen JJ (2023) Artificial intelligence in pharmacology research and practice. Clin Transl Sci 16:31–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/cts.13431

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Zhavoronkov A, Vanhaelen Q, Oprea TI (2020) Will artificial intelligence for drug discovery impact clinical pharmacology? Clin Pharmacol Ther 107:780–785. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpt.1795

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  7. Carpenter KA, Altman RB (2023) Using GPT-3 to build a lexicon of drugs of abuse synonyms for social media pharmacovigilance. Biomolecules 13:387. https://doi.org/10.3390/biom13020387

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  8. Wang H, Ding YJ, Luo Y (2023) Future of ChatGPT in pharmacovigilance. Drug Saf. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40264-023-01315-2

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  9. Krumborg JR, Mikkelsen N, Damkier P et al (2023) ChatGPT: first glance from a perspective of clinical pharmacology. Basic Clin Pharmacol Toxicol 133:3–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/bcpt.13879

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  10. Dave T, Athaluri SA, Singh S (2023) ChatGPT in medicine: an overview of its applications, advantages, limitations, future prospects, and ethical considerations. Front Artif Intell 6

  11. Krumborg J, Mikkelsen N, Damkier P et al (2023) ChatGPT: first glance from a perspective of clinical pharmacology. Preprints

  12. Nori H, King N, McKinney SM et al (2023) Capabilities of GPT-4 on medical challenge problems

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical and Clinical Pharmacology, Centre of Pharmacovigilance and Pharmacoepidemiology, Faculty of Medicine, Toulouse University Hospital (CHU), Toulouse, France

    François Montastruc, Wilhelm Storck, Claire de Canecaude, Léa Victor, Julien Li, Candice Cesbron, Yoann Zelmat & Romain Barus

Authors
  1. François Montastruc
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Wilhelm Storck
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Claire de Canecaude
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Léa Victor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Julien Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Candice Cesbron
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Yoann Zelmat
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Romain Barus
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. W.S. prepared Fig. 1. F.M. prepared Table 1. The first draft of the manuscript was written by R.B., and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Romain Barus.

Ethics declarations

Ethical approval

Not applicable.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

François Montastruc and Wilhelm Storck contributed equally to this work as the first authors.

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Montastruc, F., Storck, W., de Canecaude, C. et al. Will artificial intelligence chatbots replace clinical pharmacologists? An exploratory study in clinical practice. Eur J Clin Pharmacol 79, 1375–1384 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00228-023-03547-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00228-023-03547-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation