Improving detection of adverse drug reactions

DSRU Director, Professor Saad Shakir, attended a three day meeting in Erice in Sicily on “Improving the Detection Analysis and Reporting Harms in Medicines”. The meeting was organised by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre and the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford.

The areas addressed at the meeting were the problems and proposed solutions for monitoring adverse drug reactions in clinical trials, the problems and proposed solutions for postmarketing pharmacovigilance and the problems and possible solutions for communications of drug safety.

Professor Shakir chaired the session and led the discussion on the proposed solutions for postmarketing pharmacovigilance. He said that a key approach would be to de-silo what are now separate activities such as genetics, pharmacology, clinical research and pharmacoepidemiology. Better communication will facilitate more effective postmarketing pharmacovigilance.