How machine translation fast-tracks pharmacovigilance regulatory reporting without cutting corners

In the world of pharmacovigilance and drug safety, speed and accuracy are critical to ensure all new drugs coming to market are safe and effective. With so little margin for error, pharmacovigilance is an area perfectly placed to reap the benefits of integrating AI-powered machine translation solutions into its workflows. 

As the scope of pharmacovigilance rapidly increases, so do the reputational and financial costs of contravening its accompanying regulations. With the typical phase III study being conducted in over 30 countries, a vast number of safety reports and related materials are generated from sites around the world. 

This means the pressure is on life sciences organizations, especially pharmaceutical companies, to ensure their workflows keep pace and that patient safety remains front and center in the effort to bring new drugs to global markets. 

A key area in which this challenge manifests is data and document translations. Already a critical part of pharmacovigilance, the need for faster, highly accurate translations is magnified when the goal is to scale operations across geographies, legal jurisdictions, and regulatory bodies, such as the European Medicines Agency and the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). 

This is where AI-powered machine translation (MT) holds the potential to prove a transformative tool. It revolutionizes pharmacovigilance efficiency and provides your organization with the capability to massively scale its operations in this space. 

AI-powered MT removes speed and scale obstacles at a stroke. Powered by advanced algorithms and deep learning techniques, it can recognize and store specific pharmaceutical terminology and intricacies. 

This means it instantly translates safety reports, adverse event data, regulatory documents, and medical literature in huge volumes across many thousands of language combinations. Add in the strict data security built in enterprise-grade (this is excluding the free online translation tools) and MT not only expedites the translation process but also ensures consistency, precision, and continual adherence to industry and jurisdiction guidelines through enabling a streamlined reporting process. All are critical factors to safeguard patient welfare and maintain regulatory compliance. 

Does this mean the end of human translators in pharmacovigilance? In short, no. MT is not a wholesale replacement of human translators, and we should not think of it as such. It is more accurate to describe it as a tool that assists in the speed of translation, helping to significantly speed up and scale your pharmacovigilance operations. Human review and validation will always form a key part of educating any AI-powered MT, as it is through this method that MT learns the intricacies of pharmacovigilance language quickest. It is also often necessary to have a human review to maintain compliance with regulatory standards. 

At RWS we work with solutions that can deliver a huge improvement in translation speed and performance across the widest range of geographies and jurisdictions, that are being used by many of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies, without ever compromising patient data security or confidentiality.