British Pharmacopoeia Commission March 2025 Meeting

Published 14 April 2025

Last month the British Pharmacopoeia Commission (BPC) held its first meeting of 2025.

The BPC, composed of Members with expertise in research, the pharmaceutical industry, the UK healthcare system, and lay members representing patients, plays a crucial role in setting quality standards to support the quality of medicines in the UK and globally. 

During the meeting, the Commission endorsed the publication of the British Pharmacopoeia (BP) 2026 and the British Approved Names (BAN) 2026, ensuring that the new and revised standards being set will strengthen the quality of medicines in all our products.  

In addition, other key discussions included: 

  • an upcoming revision to the BP Environmental sustainability information pack. The pack is non-mandatory, free to access guidance and has been developed to enable BP users to reduce their environmental impact by uniting the sector’s action and ambition behind sustainability, identifying key challenges and priority areas to focus efforts, convening sustainability information and case studies of sustainability changes and facilitating compliance with the BP to be maintained through any sustainability changes.

    The second iteration of the pack will include several new case studies from a range of external contributors both domestic and international, as well as including examples of method scaling and solvent recirculation carried out in the BP Laboratory. 

  • a workshop in which the Commission were challenged to consider how the impact of the work of the BPC on patients can be measured. Members were asked to consider four themes which were: the coverage of BP standards, the BP’s non-mandatory guidance, the MHRA Laboratory and Cost and Efficiency. 

  • an agreement on the prioritisation of the BP’s work programme. The Commission discussed using prescribing data, hospital purchases, general and pharmacy-only sales, and other factors important to patients (critical medicines, major conditions, and medicines with potential supply issues). 

  • an agreement from the BPC to evolve the Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMP) Working Party into an Expert Advisory Group. The working party had originally been established to assess the feasibility of producing non-mandatory guidance for ATMPs. The Commission reviewed the value of this guidance and confirmed its development, publication and revision should remain a permanent activity. The non-mandatory ATMP guidance can be accessed via the BP website. 

For more information about the BPC and its members, visit the Meet the Team page. You can also view the summary minutes of the BPC and other Expert group meetings on the Meetings and minutes page.