Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) which acts as the National Coordinating Centre (NCC) for Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI) is going to add 13 new Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) monitoring centres across the country by March 2012. With this addition, the total number of ADR centres dedicated for the pharmacovigilance programme will be 75 in total.
At present, there are 62 ADR centres established across the country, in a phased manner, to monitor ADRs in the Indian population and create awareness amongst healthcare professionals about the importance of ADR reporting in India.
According to Dr G N Singh, secretary cum scientific director of IPC, over the course of next two years, NCC plans to add 100 more ADR centres under PvPI to enable better scrutiny of the safety and efficacy of the medicines used within the country. He added, “We want to ensure that, over the next few years there are enough ADR centres across the country to monitor benefit and risk profiles of the medicines so that we can achieve our goal of ensuring public safety more aptly.”
Recently, IPC through NCC had initiated a programme to develop software for setting up a national drug safety database within the country by collaborating with WHO-Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) through its Vigiflow software.
The centre for excellence established by the NCC to provide technical support and access to UMC’s worldwide medicines safety data and potential safety hazards data of medicines worldwide are located in Maharashtra, Karnataka; PGI Chandigarh, and Kolkatta.
After successfully initiating the linkage between NCC and UMC in the four centre for excellence which also acts as zonal office, NCC is soon going to facilitate the technical support from these zonal centres to all other sub zonal ADR centres by end of this year.
Dr Singh informed that these support centres have already begun their operations by being a centre of excellence which enables India to access Vigibase for collecting and processing data on ADR's worldwide. “These centres have already started generating information on ADRs through Vigiflow, we hope that by December end we will be able to extend and facilitate technical support on the same by sharing the latest data on ADR's to other centres as well,” he said.
Through this linkage, the NCC will not only be controlling the activities and facilitating technical support to all other sub-zonal ADR centres, but it also will be providing vital data on recent information collected though Vigibase to other ADR centres for reference.