At the forefront of medicines safety

At Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC), we promote the safer use of medicines globally in close collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO). We do this by bringing technical and scientific support to WHO and our stakeholders, and through our research activities and the development of innovative tools and solutions.

We advance the science and practice of pharmacovigilance, which covers the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse drug reactions and other medicine-related problems. We aid member countries of the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring in the collection and analysis of medicines safety data. We equip pharmacovigilance stakeholders and regulators with the knowledge they need to make use of the information that is generated from the programme’s global activities.

We maintain VigiBase, WHO’s global database of reported potential side effects of medicinal products, which grows by a few million reports annually and passed 30 million reports in 2022. The insights that we and our partners get from this data enable us to identify potential risks and prevent unnecessary harm to patients taking medicines.

We also provide WHODrug Global, used by the pharmaceutical industry and researchers for coding and managing information on medical products, and we produce cutting-edge tools and analytical methods in the area of patient safety.

We advance medicines safety together with WHO, the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring, and other stakeholders. We have established collaborations and partnerships with hundreds of institutions, professional societies, research units, government departments and commercial operations worldwide.

Working together with all these partners, our ultimate goal is to influence the lives and safety of patients for the better, now and in the future.