Professor Ivor Ralph Edwards, MB, ChB, MRCS, LRCP, MRCP, FRCP, FRACP just retired as Director, WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring (the Uppsala Monitoring Centre).

Trained in both general internal medicine and clinical pharmacology, he has been a practicing consultant specialist physician and also taught at undergraduate and graduate levels in both areas for 30 years. He has worked in clinical toxicology in the fields of drug abuse, acute and chronic poisoning, toxicity from industrial chemicals as well as adverse drug reactions.

In the past Ralph worked with laboratory studies of mechanisms in clinical toxicology; international analysis of ADR and toxicology case report rates and both clinical trials and multicentre controlled cohort studies.

Research in the last 10 yrs. has been on drug benefit-risk analysis and the use of Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Networks as an aid to the analysis of large amounts of case data (2 million case records in the WHO International Adverse Drug Reaction database). His recent work has been in the identification and confirmation of ADR's using data mining of global adverse drug reaction data.

Currently, Ralph is using data mining of very large longitudinal health care record data sources, and widening my interests to broader patient safety matters.

Ralph is also been an initiator into good communications practice on drug benefit and risk.

He advises on clinical toxicology issues, mostly involving adverse drug reactions, all over the world. Ralph has been consulted by the WHO, regulatory authorities, the pharmaceutical industry, international projects and programs, as well as individuals. (www.ralphedwards.se)

Specialties:
- Data mining
- Pharmacoepidemiology
- Expert advice in litigation
- Clinical toxicology
- Diplomacy

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