fda_drugs(): queries the official FDA drug database

[JeetVaria]

First, thank you for all the excellent work to date; your recent publications (e.g., https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.26.26349444v1.full.pdf) for data mining of FAERS have provided much inspiration. The tutorials are excellent.

I am currently using it for data mining of FAERS for pharmacovigilance of various psychotropic pharmaceuticals.

The standardisation with MedDRA and “data_dedup” run perfectly; however, I have hit a bottleneck for the function “fda_drugs()” and receive an error:

"Downloading file from: https://www.fda.gov/media/89850/download?attachment
trying URL 'https://www.fda.gov/media/89850/download?attachment'
Error in utils::download.file(urls, destfile = file_paths, ...) :
cannot open URL 'https://www.fda.gov/media/89850/download?attachment'
In addition: Warning messages:
1: In utils::download.file(urls, destfile = file_paths, ...) :
downloaded length 0 != reported length 10
2: In utils::download.file(urls, destfile = file_paths, ...) :
cannot open URL 'https://www.fda.gov/apology_objects/abuse-detection-apology.html': HTTP status was '404 Not Found'
Called from: utils::download.file(urls, destfile = file_paths, ...)"

Any help for work around would be appreciated.

Thank you again!

[MadDERt]

Thank you very much for your recognition! I'm glad that the faers package and related tutorials can assist with your pharmacovigilance research.
Regarding the error in the fda_drugs() function, I have fixed this issue in the latest version on GitHub. Due to the synchronization delay of the Bioconductor stable release, you can resolve it immediately by installing the GitHub development version directly using the following code:

if (!require("remotes")) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("WangLabCSU/faers")