Joan-Ramón Laporte

Joan-Ramon Laporte (Barcelona, ​​1948) is a medical pharmacologist. He is emeritus professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He was head of the pharmacology department at the Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona (1984-2014). In 1983, he founded the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology, a collaborating center of the World Health Organization (WHO). He has worked in international cooperation in numerous countries, under the auspices of the WHO, UNICEF, the Spanish Ministry of Health, and other institutions, notably in Brazil (1983-89), Argentina (1984-2018), Mozambique (1986-91), and Nicaragua (1984-89). -99).

He received his doctorate in Medicine in 1974 with the Extraordinary Doctorate Award, with the first doctoral thesis written in Catalan in a Faculty of Medicine in Catalonia.

In the early 1980s, he introduced the system for reporting suspected adverse effects of medicines in Catalonia and collaborated with the Ministry of Health to extend it to all the autonomous communities to form the Spanish Pharmacovigilance System, coordinated by the Catalan Institute of Pharmacology until 1992.

He was the author of the first studies on the use of medicines in the community and on pharmacoepidemiology carried out in Catalonia and Spain, and has developed epidemiological methods for the evaluation of adverse effects of medicines. These studies led to numerous regulatory decisions on drugs and the withdrawal from the market of several ineffective and dangerous drugs.

He was the founder of the Spanish Society of Clinical Pharmacology, the European Association of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics (EACPT), the EURO DURG network promoted by the European Regional Office of the WHO, the International Society of Independent Drug Bulletins (ISDB) of the European Pharmacovigilance Research Group in the 1980s, and the ENCePP network of European centers for pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology promoted by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

He was president of the WHO Committee on Essential Medicines in 2003 and 2005. During this period, antiretroviral drugs and drugs for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy were incorporated for the first time in the WHO List of Essential Medicines. In 2015, he was part of the United Nations group of experts for the Sustainable Development Goals in the area of ​​Health and Well-being.

He has taught courses on clinical pharmacology, pharmacoepidemiology, and pharmacovigilance at the Karolinska Institute, New York University, and the Universities of Bordeaux, Paris, Naples, Messina, Verona, Mexico City, Córdoba (Argentina), Corrientes, La Plata, Havana, and Bogotá, among others.

He has participated in numerous research projects in Catalonia, Spain, Europe, and globally. He has 450 indexed scientific publications (9,185 citations). He has published more than twenty books on pharmacology, therapeutics and pharmacoepidemiology, including the Pharmacological Index for Primary Care (1983 to 2004), Principles of Drug Epidemiology, Principles of Clinical Research and Chronicle of an Intoxicated Society.

In 1983 he founded and directed until 2018 the publication Butlletí Groc, which offered information on drugs and therapeutics that was rigorous and independent of pharmaceutical companies and public administrations.

He is a member of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans. He has received several awards from the Pan American Health Organization, the World Health Organization (2007), the City of Havana (2000) and the Eduardo Mondlane University of Mozambique (2013).

He recently published the book “Chronicle of an Intoxicated Society”.