The incorporation of patients' perspectives into drug discovery and development has become critically important from the viewpoint of accounting for modern-day business dynamics. There is a trend among patients to narrate their disease experiences on social media. The insights gained by analyzing the data pertaining to such social-media posts could be leveraged to support patient-centered drug development. Manual analysis of these data is nearly impossible, but artificial intelligence enables automated and cost-effective processing, also referred as social media mining (SMM). This paper discusses the fundamental SMM methods along with several relevant drug-development use cases.

从考虑现代商业动态的角度来看，将患者的观点纳入药物发现和开发已变得至关重要。患者有一种在社交媒体上讲述他们的疾病经历的趋势。通过分析与此类社交媒体帖子相关的数据获得的见解可用于支持以患者为中心的药物开发。手动分析这些数据几乎是不可能的，但人工智能可以实现自动化且经济高效的处理，也称为社交媒体挖掘 (SMM)。本文讨论了基本的 SMM 方法以及几个相关的药物开发用例。