Korea and 20 other nations have joined together to create a single oversight body for the world’s medical regulators. 

The Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) is one of the founding members of the newly formed International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities (ICMRA), a multilateral network designed to regulate and manage medicine coming from all over the world. 

The newly established entity consists of 21 medicine and medical regulators from Korea, the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, China, the Netherlands and elsewhere. 

The establishment was agreed upon at an international summit for 21 national medical regulators held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from December 3 until 6. 

The summit takes place every year, bringing together the 21 member states plus representatives from the World Health Organization (WHO), allowing them to share ideas and come up with cooperative measures that could boost multilateral cooperation and improve public health worldwide. 

The ICMRA will be test-operated for two years and afterward take on its full range of duties. The 21 ICMRA members will carry out the following tasks: put in place an ICMRA operating system and regulations; analyze the status of international medicine-related cooperative projects already underway; share information between member states; inspect good manufacturing practices and generic drugs; and, help develop the enforcement capacity of medical regulatory bodies in developing countries. 

Korea’s MFDS will take on three such tasks, including the analysis of existing international medicine-related cooperative projects and the supervision of good manufacturing practices and generic medicines. 

“Cooperating through the ICMRA will help expand government-level cooperative networks between the 21 nations and that will, in turn, make for the smooth export of domestically-made medicines,” said the Korean drug regulator.