International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology
The International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) was launched officially by Stanley A. Edlavitch, David E. Lilienfeld, and Hugh A. Tilson in 1989 during the Fifth International Conference on Pharmacoepidemiology (ICPE) in Minneapolis. (The initial conference, in 1985, was the International Conference on Linked Databases.) ISPE is the only international acting society dealing with the topics of pharmacoepidemiology in the context of pharmacovigilance or drug safety; the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) addresses outcomes research epidemiology. The society has organized yearly conferences since its foundation. The society's office is located in Bethesda, Maryland, and its executive director is Mark Epstein. A number of the major figures in drug safety and pharmacovigilance have served as its Presidents, and its Officers and Trustees have been drawn from the leadership of the pharmacoepidemiology community. Members of the Society come from 53 nations and mostly come from academia, pharmaceutical industry, Contract Research Organizations and governmental institutions (e.g., U.S. Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, EMEA, BfArM, Robert Koch Institute (RKI)[1]) acting als drug regulators. The official journal of the society is Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety which is indexed in MEDLINE and the regularly edited newsletter Scribe is available on the above-mentioned website of ISPE. (The original Society newsletter was the PharmacoEpidemiology Newsletter (PEN), created by Stanley A. Edlavitch (edited by Edlavitch and David E. Lilienfeld) in 1985. In 1992, the Society returned the PEN to Edlavitch.) The current president of the society is John D. Seeger, from the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women's Hospital Boston, MA.
The ISPE is directed by a structured Board of Trustees, ensuring that each of its various constituencies has some voice within the organization. The major areas within which pharmacoepidemiology is practiced (industry, government, academia) provides the framework for the three forums within which ISPE members may raise items for discussion by the ISPE Board.