ABSTRACT
Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) is an independent and self-funded Swedish foundation. There are many stakeholders in the field of medicines safety, and by drawing on our different competences, skills and roles in the PV world, UMC strives to always pursue our vision: working together to advance medicines safety. UMC's different business areas focus on various external stakeholders, one of which focuses on the WHO Programme of International Drug Monitoring (WHO PIDM). Since 1968, the programme has provided a forum for WHO Member States to collaborate in pharmacovigilance. This enables programme members to be alerted to patterns of harm emerging across the world, but which might not be evident from their local data alone. There are now over 170 member countries/territories. The programme's operational activities were moved to Uppsala in 1978 under the sponsorship of the Swedish government, which marked the starting point for our organization and its designation as one of WHO's 800 Collaborating centres - the WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring.1 UMC is custodian and manager of VigiBase, WHO's global database of reported potential side effects of medicinal products. This gold mine is used to generate insights for various PV stakeholders. The WHO PIDM members, which are usually the national regulatory authorities, collect reports of adverse events from patients, physicians, the pharmaceutical industry and other stakeholders within their national PV systems. VigiBase accumulates the data from programme members, and currently contains about 33 million case reports. For other external stakeholders, VigiBase data can be made available with limited level of detail via VigiBase Services, open to, for example, academia, the pharmaceutical industry and health care providers.2,3 Besides VigiBase maintenance, our Collaborating Centre also provides programme members with IT solutions for data collection and analysis in their national setting to support their mission for safe products in their markets. There are many IT solutions, but to highlight two: VigiFlow, for example, is a data collection and management system, used by over 100 members as their national safety database. And in VigiLyze, members have a powerful analysis tool free of charge, which can analyse national data as well as data in regional collaborations with instant access to the global data in VigiBase and others' experiences as a reference. Safety signals found by UMC and other programme members are also available in VigiLyze. The Collaborating Centre generates and shares credible and evidence-based information on the safety of medicines and vaccines for further decision-making by regulators and scientific high-level committees. That work relies on the use of sophisticated methods for signal detection, but also on internal and external clinical expertise. Selected signals are also published in scientific journals to reach a broader audience such as the prescribers. In addition, our centre helps national pharmacovigilance centres to support safe use of medicines by offering training aligned with their needs. We get many training requests from WHO PIDM members and WHO regions. Our hands-on and web-based courses provide national centres with the technical knowhow and skills to strengthen their pharmacovigilance systems and practices. We also facilitate the sharing of PV insights and know-how globally using a variety of channels for information;for example, Uppsala Reports magazine and website, our podcast called Drug Safety Matters and our various social media channels. COVID-19 vaccine safety monitoring is a top priority at UMC, and significant resources have been allocated to this. Our recent insights and experiences have enriched us and brought us even closer to our collaborating partners and we are better prepared for the next challenges.4.