The WEB-RADR General Assembly was hosted on 21 April at the Royal College of Physicians.
The meeting brought together representatives from each partner of the WEB-RADR consortium and, as Dr June Raine explained in her welcome, was organised to provide an opportunity for participants of each Work Package to provide updates on what they had achieved since the launch in September 2014, affirm the excellence in collaboration, and motivate partners to continue their good work to reshape the pharmacovigilance world.
Project Lead Phil Tregunno also highlighted milestones completed over the first 599-days of the project and the communication highlights (publications, presentations, website and Twitter activity).
Dr Robert Ball, representing the FDA, provided a view from the projects external General Advisory Board, and spoke of FDA initiatives related to WEB-RADR, and the need for collaboration and harmonisation.
The processes and results of social media data collection, classification and analytics (ADR detection and signal detection) were demonstrated by Work Packages 2A (Dr Nabarun Dasgupta, Epidemico) and 2B (Dr Johan Ellenius, UMC and Dr John van Stekelenborg, JNJ). Underpinning these results was Ms Victoria Newbould’s (EMA) explanation of WP1’s assessment of relevant EU data protection legislation, stakeholder needs, ethical aspects and plans to elaborate a policy framework.
Representatives of Work Packages 3A (Ms Carrie Pierce, Epidemico) and 3B (Dr Peter Mol, University of Groningen) displayed the three mobile apps (Yellow Card, LAREB and HALMED) that had been developed as part of the project and explained the key barriers and facilitators identified for two way risk communication.
University of Liverpool (Professor Simon Maskell) presented WP4’s assessment of the utility of the app, social media, and the integration of ADR data from multiple sources, alongside LAREB’s quality assessment tool.
After presentations and discussions about each Work Package, the meeting concluded with a lively discussion, with the key themes emerging from the day being; maximising the move to mobile technology and building on current learnings, the areas where social media is useful and how can this be captured and how this technology can be shared globally.

The meeting was a huge success with fantastic contribution from all participants throughout the day, and served to focus the consortium on the months ahead, whilst recognising the significant achievements in the project so far.
Every member of the WEB-RADR consortium should be immensely proud of the work achieved to create lasting technical innovations in drug safety monitoring based on sound science which will potentially improve the public health of millions.
To follow the days progress, please see WEB-RADR’s Twitter posts: @WEBRADR