WHO Prequalification¶
WHO Prequalification matters when you need global regulatory context for medicines and WHO-prequalified vaccines used across procurement and access programs outside the U.S./EU-only lens. It is the right page for questions about whether a medicine appears in the WHO finished-pharmaceutical-products list or the WHO active-pharmaceutical-ingredients list, whether a vaccine appears in the WHO vaccine prequalification export, and how that status compares with other regional drug views.
In BioMCP, WHO Prequalification is a local-runtime source for drug name/alias lookups and regional regulatory sections rather than a live per-request API surface. BioMCP auto-downloads the finished-pharmaceutical-products CSV, the active-pharmaceutical-ingredients CSV, and the vaccine export into BIOMCP_WHO_DIR or the default data directory on first use, supports --region who|all, lets structured --region who searches filter structured U.S. hits through WHO prequalification for finished-pharma/API rows, supports --product-type <finished_pharma|api|vaccine> on explicit WHO searches, keeps vaccine support search-only in this ticket, and exposes biomcp who sync when you want a forced refresh of all three exports.
What BioMCP exposes¶
| Command | What BioMCP gets from this source | Integration note |
|---|---|---|
search drug <name> --region who |
WHO-prequalified drug matches by name or alias | Uses the local WHO finished-pharma + API batch for WHO-only name/alias lookups |
search drug <name> --region all |
Combined U.S., EU, and WHO name/alias search | Adds WHO rows to the split all-region output |
search drug --indication <disease> --region who |
WHO-prequalified rows filtered from structured U.S. search hits | Keeps MyChem structured semantics and narrows results through the WHO batch |
search drug <name> --region who --product-type <finished_pharma|api|vaccine> |
WHO-only source-type filtering | Narrows WHO search rows to finished pharmaceutical products, active pharmaceutical ingredients, or vaccine rows |
get drug <name> regulatory --region who|all |
WHO or combined regulatory context | WHO-backed regional regulatory section |
Example commands¶
Returns WHO-prequalified trastuzumab rows from the local WHO dataset.
Returns only WHO active-pharmaceutical-ingredient rows for artesunate. --product-type requires explicit --region who.
Returns WHO vaccine rows for BCG. WHO vaccine support is explicit search-only in this release, so use a vaccine name or brand with --product-type vaccine instead of get drug.
Filters structured U.S. malaria hits through the local WHO prequalification batch.
Returns WHO-backed regulatory context for the WHO region.
API access¶
No BioMCP API key required. BioMCP auto-downloads the WHO finished-pharmaceutical-products CSV, active-pharmaceutical-ingredients CSV, and vaccine CSV into BIOMCP_WHO_DIR or the default data directory on first use.
Official source¶
The official WHO CSV exports behind BioMCP's WHO drug context are: