13. Juli 2023 – OPEN was established by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in December 2020 as a framework to increase international collaboration and share scientific expertise on the evaluation of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, initially as a pilot. It allows regulators from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the World Health Organization (WHO) to conduct near-concurrent reviews of certain new medicines and exchange their views and reports on the product assessments. This can help accelerate and align regulatory decisions in several regions in the world, leading to fewer questions for industry and more alignment on the product labelling, while maintaining regulators’ independence in their decision making. Following the success of the pilot, EMA has expanded the scope of the OPEN initiative from COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to a wider range of medicines, such as medicines with the potential to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR), respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections or newly diagnosed myelodysplastic syndromes (and other hereditary diseases).

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