MHRA announces appointment of Chief Safety Officer

Today (4 May 2021) the MHRA announced the appointment of Dr Alison Cave as its new Chief Safety Officer. As a member of the Executive Committee, Alison will lead on safety and vigilance functions and become a Board Director of the Agency.

Alison is a pharmacologist with a PhD in biochemistry. Her long career includes significant academic and regulatory experience, the latter initially at the Medicines Control Agency and then in senior roles within the Vigilance and Risk Management of Medicine Group at the MHRA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Most recently she was an Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund Director at UK Research and Innovation.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Alison Cave to the team. This is a key appointment for the agency which signals our commitment to ensuring patient voice is at the heart of everything we do.

Alison’s wealth of academic knowledge, experience of working in partnership with industry and regulatory expertise will inform and strengthen our safety and vigilance functions and makes her the ideal champion for the patient voice.

I am tremendously excited to be joining the MHRA as Chief Safety Officer at a time when a rapidly changing scientific, technological and analytical landscape is bringing us new opportunities to evolve the evidence generation around the benefits and risks of medicines and devices.

I look forward to working with colleagues at MHRA to continue to improve our medicines and devices safety surveillance in the UK and in facilitating the close partnerships with patients and healthcare professionals envisaged by the Cumberlege report.

Alison will take up her post on 19 July 2021.