The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) is stepping up its efforts to ensure that doctors prescribe right medicines apart from strengthening the mechanisms to determine adverse effects of drugs in use.
The IPC, which prescribes quality and testing parameters for drugs, will be launching National Formulary of India, a detailed list of drugs to be used for treating different conditions next month. It can be used as a reference document by persons in the medical field as well as patients to avoid using wrong drugs.
Also, the organisation is planning to strengthen the network of pharmacovigilance centres, the designated teaching hospitals, to 100 from the present 40 by next year through which it collects the feedback on the effects of individual drugs when they are used on patients.
Disclosing this here on Friday, B Suresh, chairman of IPC’s scientific body said they were focusing on end-user safety with regard to drugs by making the proposed formulary widely available to all, through print as well as the internet medium. The IPC is also planning to collect data base on the adverse effects of all the drugs used in India as these effects vary from communities to communities depending on their genetic make-up, and therefore it is essential to know how they work on Indian patients.
So far, the IPC, through the national coordination unit, had generated 15,000 reports on the adverse effects of medicines and this process will be further speeded up through the expansion of the network of pharmacovigilance centres, according to Suresh.
The pharmacopoeia commission is planning to develop more number of monographs (testing and quality parameters of individual drugs with benchmark standards) of drugs to take the tally to 3,000 in the next five years from the present 1,900 besides developing new reference standards by strengthening its laboratory facilities.
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“We will work very rigorously for the next five years on achieving these objects,” Suresh, who is also the member of the US Pharmacopoeia (USP) said.
USP, IPC to collaborate on new areas, including biologicals
USP chief executive officer Roger L Williams on Friday announced that both the pharmacopoeias will be collaborating on developing the standards and reference substances for both chemical and biological medicines which are currently in use globally.
Speaking to media after formally inaugurating the USP's own building facilities, Williams said both the bodies will be sharing the monographs of biologicals (vaccines etc) for the first time through their joint scientific endeavour.
The USP’s Hyderabad facility, with 100,000 sft of space, is built at a cost of $14 million and is the second largest campus after its US facility. The USP had set up its base in Hyderabad in 2006 at a leased premises and now has moved to its own campus set up at the IKP Knowledge Park on the city outskirts.
Williams said the staff will be increased to 200 in the next few years from the present 70, which will be playing a major role in producing reference materials apart from taking part in the USP's verification programmes, especially for dietary supplements.
Responding to a question, he said that they had also been collaborating with the IPC and Indian experts on developing standards for ayurvedic substances, which are allowed to be sold in the US.