The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) is an international, non-governmental, non-profit organization established jointly by WHO and UNESCO in 1949. In 2009 CIOMS was celebrating the 60^th anniversary of its creation.

Through its membership, CIOMS is representative of a substantial proportion of the biomedical scientific community. The membership of CIOMS in 2010 includes over 55 international, national and associate member organizations, representing many of the biomedical disciplines, national academies of sciences and medical research councils. The main objectives of CIOMS are:

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At its 78th Executive Committee Meeting in November 2011 CIOMS decided to initiate a review procedure of its GLs on Ethics in Biomedical Research from 2002. The guideline is globally distributed and widely used.

The first meeting of the new CIOMS Working Group on research ethics was held 4-5 September 2012 in Geneva.

Read more: 4-5 September: first meeting of the new CIOMS Working Group on research ethics in Geneva

CIOMS Working Group IX was created in April 2010 based on suggestions from a number of drug regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical companies. The overall objective of the efforts of this Working Group is to consolidate concepts of risk management tools and propose their application in order to harmonize views and globally protect public health, and to positively impact prescriber-patient interactions.

Read more: CIOMS Working Group IX on "Practical Considerations for Development and Application of a Toolkit...

Meta-analyses have been increasingly used in the scientific evaluation of efficacy and safety in benefit-risk assessments, as well as for pricing  and the reimbursement of biopharmaceutical products. Over the last few years, the outcome of meta-analyses has been both debated and used as  evidence within the regulatory process for human medicinal products, and their interpretation has ometimes contributed to different regulatory actions for the same product.

Read more: CIOMS Working Group X on "Considerations for applying good meta-analysis practices to clinical...

Historically, the project began in 2003 as a CIOMS initiative, in response to indications received from some drug regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical companies that they had concerns about the parallel development of special drug safety search programs based on the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA). This would cause an unavoidable duplication of effort and uncertainty within pharmaceutical companies about the utility of these searches on the part of drug regulatory authorities.

Read more: CIOMS Working Group on Standardised MedDRA Queries (SMQs)