Patna, Nov. 18: Pharmaceutical companies need to be informed about the various aspects of a medicine before they arrive in the market, speakers at the 11th National Annual conference of Society of Pharmacovigilance, India.

They said the pharmacologists need to switch from identifying the efficacy of a drug to assessing its “safety”, to ensure there are not too many adverse effects on the consumers.

“The extent of consumption of a particular drug or medicine should be identified before taking into account the extent to which they would help in controlling a particular disease,” experts said.

Nalanda Medical College is playing host to the three-day conference, which is being held for the first time in the state. A number of dignitaries, including Dr Saad Shakir, director of Drug Safety Research Unit at Southampton, S.K. Tripathi, professor of clinical and experimental pharmacology at School of Tropical Medicine, Calcutta, Dr Ronald H.B. Meyboom, medical advisor Uppsala Monitoring Committee, Sweden, among others were present at the conference.

“Pharmacovigilance deals with the science or practice of monitoring, detection, evaluation and response to the hazards of a drug among humans during its pre-marketing or post marketing development,” Dr Shakir said, adding that it is of utmost importance to assess the adverse drug reactions even before they arrive at the market.

S.K. Tripathi spoke about the drawbacks in the field of pharmacovigilance in pharmeceutical companies. “The clinical trial of a drug is done on a very small chunk of people, which is why the process cannot be said to be effective,” he said .