Background

Vision

The ConcePTION consortium believes that we have an important societal obligation to radically and rapidly reduce uncertainty about the effects of medication used during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Why was ConcePTION started?

More than 5 million women get pregnant in the EU every year and a majority takes at least one medication during pregnancy. As few as 5% of available medications have been adequately monitored, tested and labelled with safety information for use in pregnant and breastfeeding women. The field, while inherently difficult to study, has suffered from a lack of systematically gathered insights that could lead to more effective data generation methodologies. Fragmentation and misinformation results in confusing and contradictory communication and perception of risks by both health professionals and women and their families.

Mission

ConcePTION aims to establish a trusted ecosystem that can efficiently, systematically, and in an ethically responsible manner, generate and disseminate reliable evidence-based information regarding effects of medications used during pregnancy and breastfeeding to women and their healthcare providers. This will be achieved by generating, cataloguing, linking, collecting and analysing data from pharmacovigilance, modelling, routine healthcare, breastmilk samples through a large network.

On sexed language

We acknowledge that not everyone with experience of pregnancy and breastfeeding are women. In our external communications, we use pregnant women, mothers and the pronouns she/her to talk about the group affected by the lack of knowledge about medicine safety in pregnancy and lactation on a group level, or in hypotheticals. This is in line with recent recommendations on effective communication about pregnancy, birth, lactation, breastfeeding and newborn care, that emphasise the importance of sexed language when communicating with this target audience. Because mothers are part of our audience, we also use the terms breastfeeding and lactation interchangeably and use breast milk instead of the more academic term human milk.