The Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) is an international non-governmental organization of 40 international, national, and associate member groups representing the biomedical science community. It was jointly established by the
World Health Organization (WHO)
The World Health Organization (WHO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for international public health. The WHO Constitution states its main objective as "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of h ...
and
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1949 as a successor to the
International Medical Congress
The International Medical Congress (french: Congrès International de Médecine) was a series of international scientific conferences on medicine that took place, periodically, from 1867 until 1913.
The idea of such a congress came in 1865, dur ...
that organized 17 conferences from 1867 until the 1913 outbreak of
World War One
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
.
The group's main goal is advancing public health by publishing guidelines on ethics, product development, and safety in medical research, such as the 2016 ''International Ethical Guidelines for Health-Related Research Involving Humans''.
Governance
The General Assembly of all CIOMS member organizations meets every year, alternating between in-person and teleconference formats, to elect the Executive Committee and its voting President. The Executive Committee of twelve representatives from national and international member groups meets at least one a year, appointing and guiding the Secretariat, comprised of the Secretary-General and their team in Geneva, Switzerland. The Executive Committee can invite non-voting ad hoc observers and technical experts.
Round Tables and Working Groups
After its 1948 founding by UNESCO and the WHO as the Council for Coordination of International Medical Congresses, these UN specialized agencies funded its first conference in
Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
,
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
. In 1952, the group was renamed as the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) to reflect a focus on guiding member organizations that internally organize field-specific conferences. From 1967 to 1997, it organized annual round tables on medical science topics, offering a standardized conference format:
* I. Biomedical Science and the Dilemma of Human Experimentation Paris, France, 1967
* II. Heart Transplantation Geneva, Switzerland, 1968
* III. Evaluation of Drugs: Whose Responsibility? Liège, Belgium, 1968
* IV. Medical Research: Priorities and Responsibilities, Geneva, Switzerland, 1969
* V. Training of Research Workers in Medical Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland, 1970
* VI. Drug Abuse: Non-Medical Use of Dependence-Producing Drugs, Geneva, Switzerland, 1971
* VII. Recent Progress in Biology and Medicine: Its Social and Ethical Implications, Paris, France, 1972
* VIII. Protection of Human Rights in the Light of Scientific and Technological Progress in Biology and Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland, 1973
* IX. Medical Care and Society, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1974
* X. Health Needs of Society: A Challenge for Medical Education Ulm, Germany, 1976
* XI. Trends and Prospects in Drug Research and Development, Geneva, Switzerland, 1977
* XII. Medical Ethics and the Protection of Human Rights Cascais, Portugal, 1978
* XIII. Economics and Health Policy, Geneva, Switzerland, 1979
* XIV. Medical Ethics and Medical Education, Mexico, 1980
* XV. Human Experimentation and Medical Ethics, Manila, Philippines, 1981
* XVI. Health for All – A Challenge to Research in Health Manpower Development, Ibadan, Nigeria, 1982
* XVII. Biomedical Research Involving Animals – Proposed International Guiding Principles, Geneva, Switzerland, 1983
* XVIII. Health Policy Ethics and Human Values: An International Dialogue, Athens, Greece, 1984
* XIV. Battered Children and Child Abuse, Berne, Switzerland, 1985
* XX. Health Manpower out of Balance. Conflicts and Prospects, Acapulco, Mexico 1986
* XXI. Health Policy, Ethics, and Human Values: European and North American Perspectives, Noordwijk, the Netherlands, 1987
* XXII. Ethics and Human Values in Family Planning, Bangkok, Thailand, 1988
* XXIII. Health Technology Transfer: Whose Responsibility? Geneva, Switzerland, 1989
* XXIV. Genetics, Ethics, and Human Values: Human Genome Mapping, Genetic Screening and Gene Therapy, Tokyo and Inuyama City, Japan, 1990
* XXV. Ethics and Epidemiology: International Guidelines, Geneva, Switzerland, 1990
* XXVI. Ethics and Research on Human Subjects. International Guidelines, Geneva, Switzerland, 1992
* XXVII. Drug Surveillance: International Cooperation – Past, Present, and Future, Geneva, Switzerland, 1993
* XXVIII. Poverty, Vulnerability, the Value of Human Life, and the Emergence of Bioethics, Ixtapa, Mexico, 1994
* The Declaration of Inuyama, a follow-up to the 1990 Conference, Inuyama and Nagayo, 1995
* XXIX. Ethics, Equity, and Health for All, Geneva, Switzerland, 1997
In 1990, CIOMS shifted to a format of assembling working groups of scientists from regulatory bodies, industry, and academia to meet for 2–4 years to reach consensus with other stakeholders and publish recommended guidelines. When the working groups are composed solely of CIOMS members, they are assigned a sequential identifier, whereas partnerships with outside groups are known by their specific topic:
*Working Group I (founded 1990): International Reporting of Adverse Drug Reactions
*Working Group II (founded 1992): International Reporting of Periodic Drug-Safety Update Summaries
*Working Group III (founded 1995): Guidelines for Preparing Core Clinical-Safety Information on Drugs
*Working Group IV (founded 1998): Benefit-Risk Balance for Marketed Drugs: Evaluation of Safety Signals
* Standardized Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) Queries (founded 2002)
* Vaccine Pharmacovigilance (founded November 2005)
* Working Group VIII (founded September 2006): Signal Detection
* Working Group IX (founded April 2010): Risk Minimization
* Working Group X (founded September 2010): Meta-Analysis
* Bioethics (founded 2011)
* Vaccine Safety (founded 2013)
* Drug-Induced Liver Injury (founded April 2017)
* Clinical Research in Resource-Limited Settings (founded November 2017)
* Working Group XI (founded April 2018): Patient Involvement
* Working Group XII (founded September 2019): Benefit-Risk Balance for Medicinal Products
* Working Group XIII (founded March 2020): Real-World Data and Real-World Evidence in Regulatory Decision Making
* Working Group XIV (founded May 2022): Artificial Intelligence in Pharmacovigilance
Publications
In March 1959,
Austin Bradford Hill
Sir Austin Bradford Hill (8 July 1897 – 18 April 1991) was an English epidemiologist and statistician, pioneered the randomised clinical trial and, together with Richard Doll, demonstrated the connection between cigarette smoking and lung c ...
, then director of the
UK Medical Research Council's Statistical Research Unit, chaired a Vienna-based CIOMS conference on controlled clinical trials. The proceedings, published in 1960, commented on research ethics, experimental design, and statistical analysis. Hill would later outline "
Bradford Hill criteria The Bradford Hill criteria, otherwise known as Hill's criteria for causation, are a group of nine principles that can be useful in establishing epidemiologic evidence of a causal relationship between a presumed cause and an observed effect and have ...
" for establishing causal relationships between statistically correlated phenomena.
This publication laid the groundwork for CIOMS' 1982, 1993, 2002, 2009, and 2016 versions of ''International Ethical Guidelines for Health-Related Research Involving Humans''.
These guidelines have been praised for including diverse stakeholders from low- and middle-income countries, compared to the
Declaration of Helsinki
The Declaration of Helsinki (DoH, fi, Helsingin julistus, sv, Helsingforsdeklarationen) is a set of ethical principles regarding human experimentation developed originally in 1964 for the medical community by the World Medical Association (WMA) ...
written by physicians of the
World Medical Association
The World Medical Association (WMA) is an international and independent confederation of free professional medical associations representing physicians worldwide. WMA was formally established on September 18, 1947 and has grown to 115 national m ...
. While neither of these documents are legally binding like the
Council of Europe
The Council of Europe (CoE; french: Conseil de l'Europe, ) is an international organisation founded in the wake of World War II to uphold European Convention on Human Rights, human rights, democracy and the Law in Europe, rule of law in Europe. ...
's
Oviedo Convention, their role as recommended guidelines avoids
ethical imperialism.
The first CIOMS working group produced
reporting formfor adverse drug reactions, which shaped the
International Council for Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH)'s E2B guideline. The
International Organisation for Standards (ISO),
European Committee for Standardization
The European Committee for Standardization (CEN, french: Comité Européen de Normalisation) is a public standards organization whose mission is to foster the economy of the European Single Market and the wider European continent in global tr ...
(CEN), and
Health Level 7 International (HL7) used these guidelines in publishing the ISO/HL7 27953:2011 standards on Health Informatics: Individual Case Safety Reports (ICSRs) in Pharmacovigilance.
Membership
International Members
*
International College of Angiology
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* ''International'' (New Order album), 2002
* ''International'' (The T ...
*
International Federation of Associations of Pharmaceutical Physicians and Pharmaceutical Medicine
*
International Federation of Otorhinolaryngological Societies
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* International (Kevin Michael album), ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* International (New Order album), ' ...
*
International Rhinologic Society
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* ''International'' (New Order album), 2002
* ''International'' (The T ...
*
International Society of Internal Medicine
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* ''International'' (New Order album), 2002
* ''International'' (The T ...
*
International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* ''International'' (New Order album), 2002
* ''International'' (The T ...
*
International Society of Pharmacovigilance The International Society of Pharmacovigilance (ISoP), previously the European Society of Pharmacovigilance (ESOP), is an international non-profit scientific organisation, which aims to foster pharmacovigilance both scientifically and educationally, ...
*
International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology
The International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (IUPHAR) is a voluntary, non-profit association representing the interests of scientists in pharmacology-related fields to facilitate ''Better Medicines through Global Education and Resear ...
*
Medical Women's International Association
The Medical Women's International Association is a non-governmental organization founded in 1919 with the purpose of representing female physicians worldwide. Esther Lovejoy was its first president. The Association grew from an international mee ...
*
World Allergy Organization
The World Allergy Organization (WAO) is an international umbrella organization of 109 regional and national allergology and clinical immunology societies that cooperate across 27 committees. Since the first World Allergy Congress (WAC) held in Zur ...
*
*
World Medical Association
The World Medical Association (WMA) is an international and independent confederation of free professional medical associations representing physicians worldwide. WMA was formally established on September 18, 1947 and has grown to 115 national m ...
National Members
* Bangladesh,
Bangladesh Medical Research Council
Bangladesh Medical Research Council is an autonomous national research body that carries out research on medical and health sciences and plans and prioritize research in Bangladesh and is located in Mohakhali, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Prof. Syed Moda ...
* Belgium,
Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium
Royal may refer to:
People
* Royal (name), a list of people with either the surname or given name
* A member of a royal family
Places United States
* Royal, Arkansas, an unincorporated community
* Royal, Illinois, a village
* Royal, Iowa, a cit ...
* Czech Republic,
Czech Medical Association
* Georgia,
Georgian Society of Pharmacology
* Germany,
Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany
Association may refer to:
*Club (organization), an association of two or more people united by a common interest or goal
*Trade association, an organization founded and funded by businesses that operate in a specific industry
*Voluntary associatio ...
* India,
Indian Council of Medical Research
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the apex body in India for the formulation, coordination and promotion of biomedical research, is one of the oldest and largest medical research bodies in the world.
The ICMR is funded by the Gove ...
* Israel,
The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, based in Jerusalem, was established in 1961 by the State of Israel to foster contact between Israeli scholars in the sciences and humanities and create a think tank for advising the government on r ...
* Republic of Korea,
Korean Academy of Medical Sciences
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
* South Africa,
South African Medical Research Council
The South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC) is a para-statal medical research organisation in South Africa. The current president is professor Glenda Gray. The South African Medical Research Council was established in 1969 to act as an indep ...
* Switzerland,
Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences
Associate Members
*
American Society for Bioethics and Humanities
The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities is an American learned society dedicated to promoting research and the exchange of ideas in bioethics and related disciplines in the humanities. It was founded in January 1998 from the merger betwee ...
*
Asia Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology
Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Afr ...
*
Consulta di Bioetica
*
Federation of Polish Medical Organizations Abroad
A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government (federalism). In a federation, the self-governi ...
*
Good Clinical Practice Alliance
*
International Council for Laboratory Animal Science
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* International (Kevin Michael album), ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* International (New Order album), ' ...
*
*
International Federation of Medical Students' Associations
The International Federation of Medical Students' Associations (IFMSA) is a non-governmental organization representing associations of medical students. It was founded in May 1951 and currently maintains 139 member organizations from 130 countr ...
*
International Medical Sciences Academy
The International Medical Sciences Academy (IMSA) is a global organization founded in 1981 with the aim of improving universal health. It is registered as a professional body under the Societies Registration Act of India and is based in New Delhi, ...
*
International Society of Hepatic Encephalopathies & Nitrogen Metabolism
*
International Union of Microbiological Societies
The International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS), founded in 1927 as the International Society of Microbiology, is one of 40 member unions and associations of the International Science Council (ISC), and was formerly under ISC's pred ...
*
International Union of Physiological Sciences
The International Union of Physiological Sciences, abbreviated IUPS, is the global umbrella organization for physiology.
IUPS aims to facilitate initiatives that strengthen the discipline of physiology. IUPS is a scientific union member of the I ...
* Medical Sciences Society of Queensland University, Haiti
*
National Fund for Scientific Research
The National Fund for Scientific Research (NFSR) (Dutch: ''Nationaal Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek'' (NFWO), French: ''Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique'' (FNRS)) was once a government institution in Belgium for supporting scient ...
*
Saudi Neonatology Society
*
World Association for Medical Law The World Association for Medical Law (WAML) was formally established in 1970. It is a not-for profit organization, and according to its statutes, its purpose is to encourage the study and discussion of problems concerning medical law, forensic and ...
*
World Federation of Chiropractic
The World Federation of Chiropractic (WFC) (french: La Fédération Mondiale de Chiropratique (FMC); es, La Federación Mundial de Quiropráctica (FMQ)) is an international consulting body representing chiropractic to the international health c ...
*
World Organization of Family Doctors
The World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) is a global not-for-profit professional organization representing family physicians and general practitioners from all regions of the world. WONCA's mission is to improve the quality of life of the ...
See also
*
CIOMS/RUCAM scale
CIOMS I Form*
Pharmacovigilance
Term Given By Tushar Sharma (UPES Batch 2025)
Pharmacovigilance (PV, or PhV), also known as drug safety, is the pharmaceutical science relating to the "collection, detection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention" of adverse effects with pharma ...
*
Clinical trial
Clinical trials are prospective biomedical or behavioral research studies on human participants designed to answer specific questions about biomedical or behavioral interventions, including new treatments (such as novel vaccines, drugs, dietar ...
*
Regulation of therapeutic goods
The regulation of therapeutic goods, defined as drugs and therapeutic devices, varies by jurisdiction. In some countries, such as the United States, they are regulated at the national level by a single agency. In other jurisdictions they are reg ...
References
External links
CIOMS Official SiteWorld Health Organization - Regulation and SafetyUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) - Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights
{{Authority control
Clinical research
Medical ethics
Pharmaceuticals policy