Uppsala Monitoring Centre
Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) is a non-profit organization in Uppsala, Sweden. It is the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring. UMC collects, assesses, and shares information about the safety of medicines and vaccines from national pharmacovigilance centers in its member countries. Since 1978, UMC has managed the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring.
Originally, the team was three pharmacists; today there are over 150 staff. UMC runs the WHO global database of individual case safety reports (ICSRs) called VigiBase and develops tools for drug safety work, including the WHO Drug Dictionary (linked to MedDRA) and VigiFlow for managing case reports.
UMC’s research focuses on data-driven methods, such as disproportionality analyses, interaction detection, pattern and duplicate case detection, safety surveillance and signal detection, and benefit–risk analysis. More than 200 scientific articles linked on UMC’s site (as of 2023).
UMC has worked to improve medicine safety communication since 1996, publishing research and books. It also produced resources like a crisis management guide, “Expecting the Worst” (2010, 2nd edition). The centre works with medicines agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, and others, and it aims to reach developing countries to strengthen pharmacovigilance worldwide.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:16 (CET).