Salmonson is new chair of CHMP
pharmafile | September 19, 2012 | News story | Business Services, Manufacturing and Production, Medical Communications, Research and Development, Sales and Marketing | CHMP, EMA, MPA, Salmonson
Dr Tomas Salmonson has been elected chair of the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) for a three-year term.
Salmonson was previously vice-chair of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) committee, and has filled the gap as interim chair following the unexpected resignation of Dr Eric Abadie in April this year.
He offers both continuity and stability for the CHMP, having been a CHMP member for more than 12 years and held the fort for much of 2012.
Salmonson is a pharmacist by training and is currently senior scientific advisor at the Swedish Medical Products Agency (MPA).
“The CHMP has many challenges ahead and, as a chair, I am committed to ensuring that we actively shape our own future,” he said in his first address in charge.
“The regulation of medicines has become much more proactive over the past few years, and we must embrace the tools we have to shape drug development pre- and post-approval.”
Salmonson also talked about the need to provide scientific advice to companies developing medicines and to agree risk-management plans for new medicines coming to the market.
His words may be a veiled reference to the recent past and the events which surrounded Abadie’s departure, which was announced in a terse, five-line statement from the EMA earlier this year.
Abadie had chaired the CHMP since 2007 and was scientific adviser to France’s rough equivalent of NICE, the Agence Francaise de Securite Sanitaire des Produits de Sante (AFSSAPS).
But AFSSAPS had been under fire in the previous 18 months, not least for failing to pull Servier Laboratories’ diabetes drug Mediator – implicated in 2,000 deaths – until 2009 in France, several years after it had been withdrawn in other countries due to safety concerns.
The agency was also mired in the more recent scandal over dodgy breast implants made by French company PIP.
AFSSAPS was dissolved at the end of April and replaced by a new body, the National Security Agency of Medicines and Health Products (MSNA) – although AFSSAPS former director general Professor Dominique Maraninchi (whom Abadie advised) was made managing director of the new organisation.
The CHMP will elect a vice-chair to replace Salmonson at its meeting next month.
Adam Hill
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