On 11 February 2020 the UNICOM project was presented at the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) for global pharmacovigilance in Sweden.

More and more international players are interested in cooperating with the UNICOM project. The UMC is the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring. It operates the technical and scientific aspects of the WHO’s worldwide pharmacovigilance network. Already back in 2015 UMC welcomed standardisation of substance data by means of IDMP application. In 2016 it announced that the UMC-managed WHODrug database, the most comprehensive and actively used drug reference dictionary in the world would be fully compliant with this new standard.

The commitment that UMC has towards excellence in pharmacovigilance and surveillance explains the high interest in UNICOM, which empirica GmbH, the scientific coordinator, was honoured to present in detail. As an outcome of the Uppsala discussions, UMC expressed interest to explore opportunities to actively participate in pharmacovigilance-related work of the project. UMC offered their knowledge and expertise also to support execution of tasks related to Medicinal Product Dictionaries and Clinical Software Systems, as well as to assist in socio-economic impact, legal and governance aspects.

The consortium is delighted about UMC’s decision to join and welcomes its new collaborators on board!