India is emerging as a target destination for procuring support services required for the global pharmaceutical industry, especially in pharmacovigilance. Several steps have been taken by the Indian regulatory authorities recently to strengthen the pharmacovigilance such as XML-E2B format reporting of ICSRs to the Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI).

The gazette notification of  March 8 this year legally mandates pharmacovigilance for all pharmaceutical companies, says Dr. Vijay Venkatraman, managing director of Oviya MedSafe, a global pharmacovigilance consulting and drug safety services organisation in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu.

He says the task of integrating and streamlining opinions and expectations of all stakeholders of Indian pharmacovigilance programme assumes great significance. Indian Pharmacovigilance Day 2016 will be observed on July 29 this year and a conference as part of it will be held in Mumbai.

Dr. Vijay will chair the first ever conference on ‘Indian Pharmacovigilance Day’ to be held in Mumbai. He had chaired the first UK Pharmacovigilance Day conference held in London in 2015.

While briefing Pharmabiz about the conference, he said expert speakers from industry, health departments, research bodies, academia and healthcare delivery centres will share their perspectives on PvPI and deliberate on the challenges they foresee in the coming years.

He said the 'Pharmacovigilance Day' series of conferences are organised in different parts of Europe by the Italian company, EasyB srl. They hold several programmes including conferences and seminars on clinical research, pharmacovigilance, statistics and epidemiology dedicated to pharmaceutical sector across Europe since 2008. Pharmacovigilance day events aspire to bring together drug safety experts from the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, pharma and medical devices companies, biotechnology firms, government agencies, academic research.etc from a specific country or region with the aim of providing a platform for discussing pharmacovigilance issues that are unique to the concerned country/region.