What is Pharmacovigilance? A Guide to Careers in Drug Safety

When most people think about careers in clinical research, roles like Clinical Research Associate or Clinical Trial Manager usually come to mind.

Put simply, pharmacovigilance is the ongoing monitoring of medicines to make sure they remain safe once they're being used by patients.

Before a medicine reaches the market, it goes through years of laboratory research and clinical trials. Those studies generate a huge amount of safety data, but no clinical trial can tell us everything.

No two days are exactly the same, but pharmacovigilance professionals spend much of their time reviewing and interpreting safety data.

• Assessing reports of suspected adverse drug reactions 
• Looking for trends across thousands of safety reports 
• Preparing documentation for regulatory authorities 
• Supporting risk management activities 
• Working closely with clinicians, researchers and regulatory colleagues 
• Helping ensure global safety reporting requirements are met

You'll often hear the term adverse drug reaction, or ADR.

In short, no. Safety monitoring begins during clinical trials and continues long after a medicine reaches patients.

If you enjoy understanding how medicines work, analysing information and solving problems, pharmacovigilance could be a good fit.

Like many areas of clinical research, pharmacovigilance offers a range of career paths.

For many people, the biggest attraction is knowing that their work contributes to patient safety.

At ICON, our pharmacovigilance teams support studies and medicines that have the potential to improve lives globally. Working alongside experts across clinical research, regulatory affairs and medical writing, they help ensure patient safety remains at the heart of everything we do.