The Pistoia Alliance, a global not-for-profit organisation that advocates for greater collaboration in life sciences R&D, has published its Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP) Ontology 1.0 under an open-source license.
The Alliance plans to support the implementation of IDMP-O across the pharmaceutical sector and is calling for pharma, technology companies, health authorities, and regulators to register interest in dedicated training programs on integrating IDMP-O into workflows.
The ontology is already in active implementation at several companies, and was co-developed under the Alliance umbrella by 11 organizations: Bayer, Novartis, GSK, Roche, Merck KGaA, Boehringer Ingelheim, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Amgen, AbbVie, and Pfizer. Contributing project partners also include the EDM Council, ACCURIDS, OSTHUS and Chemantics.
The common semantic data model will realise the intended benefits of IDMP standardisation, including improved pharmacovigilance, enabling cross-border prescriptions, and preventing medication shortages through interoperability with manufacturers.
The ontology will complement existing IDMP standards set by the ISO and ensure all IDMP data is machine-readable from the point of its creation to better support the use of AI technologies across the industry.
“IDMP-O is one of the Pistoia Alliance’s flagship projects with nearly a dozen of our large member companies involved. Our ontology bridges the gap between regulators, pharma, manufacturers, and the clinical space by offering a powerful common language for the description of medicinal product information,” comments Dr Becky Upton, President of the Pistoia Alliance.
IDMP standards are critical for giving healthcare providers and manufacturers trusted information about medicinal products regardless of brand names.
Standardising data on substances and drug marketing (Packaged Medicinal Product Identification) ensures medications are made to the correct specification and enables healthcare providers to more easily prescribe safe alternatives if one brand becomes unavailable. For example, a key use case is cross-border prescriptions;
IDMP standards make it possible to compare drug information across different countries’ medicinal product dictionaries. This means a patient in Belgium can be sure they’re taking an equivalent drug to one they were prescribed in Germany.
