At the forefront of medicines safety
Uppsala Monitoring Centre is a non-profit foundation for safer use of medicines and vaccines and the designated WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring.
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 operational 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 science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other medicine/vaccine related problem. We aid member countries of the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring in the collection and analysis of medicines and vaccines 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, the WHO global database of adverse event reports for medicines and vaccines, which grows by a few million reports annually and now holds more than 35 million reports. 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.
Our vision is the safer use of medicines and vaccines for everyone everywhere. In pursuit of that mission, we work with WHO, the members of the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring, and other stakeholders. Over more than four decades, 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.