Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: Social Media listening (SML) is used to analyse oncology-specific patient experience data (PED), and is of growing interest to various research funders. We aimed to understand how studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry differed from those without pharmaceutical sponsors.
METHODS: We conducted a scoping review, searching six databases for studies published until October 2024. Abstract and full-text screening and data extraction were completed by one investigator; at each stage a second investigator assessed 20% of studies. Study characteristics and the oncology-specific data they gathered (based on five a priori categories) were extracted and then compared based on whether they had been funded by the pharmaceutical industry or not.
RESULTS: 48 studies were included; 15/48 (31.3%) had a pharmaceutical funder, 33/48 (68.7%) didn’t. Studies with pharmaceutical funders were published more recently: 14/15 (93%) published between 2020-2024 vs 26/33 (79%), and more likely to use computational methods (67% using computational or mixed manual/computational approaches vs 45%). The most common cancer types studied were: (multiple) myeloma and breast (3/15, 20% each) for pharmaceutical funders vs breast (13/33, 39%) for other; the most common data sources for both funder types were online forums (67% for pharmaceutical, 36% for other). The types of data gathered were (pharmaceutical vs other): disease burden (93% vs 91%), side effects/adverse events (100% vs 73%), data on disease/treatment importance/priorities (40% vs 12%), treatment experiences (73% vs 94%), and unmet needs (53% vs 21%); the median number of data points were 1,360 (pharmaceutical) vs 2,426 (other.)
CONCLUSIONS: On average, studies with pharmaceutical funders were more recent, more likely to use computational methods, and more likely to analyse data on adverse events and unmet needs, but contained fewer data points.