Quality Systems

Rockville, MD (May 1)-The US Food and Drug Administration issued a guidance to alert pharmaceutical manufacturers, pharmacy compounders, repackers, and suppliers to the potential public health hazard of glycerin contaminated with diethylene glycol (DEG), a poison.

Breaking up is easy to do.

Fewer field offices and inspectors will increase reliance on manufacturers to ensure product and process quality.

Sanofi to Close Irish Plant, FDA Inspections and Warning Letters Continue to Decline, FDA Submits Final Proposals for PDUFA IV, and more.

USP applies metrological principles to the dissolution procedure alone and in collaborative studies to understand and minimize potential sources of variability.

San Juan, PR (Apr. 25)-Regulatory and quality issues were prominent discussion topics at this year?s ExcipientFest conference and exhibition.

Interphex2007, New York, NY (Apr. 26)-Robustness studies for analytical methods are critical in being able to provide the assurance to the quality of an analytical method, a topic addressed in a conference session, "Performing Analytical Method Validation Robustness for Regulatory Compliance," at Interphex on Thursday.

Interphex2007 (Apr. 25)-As the pharmaceutical industry moves to a risk-based approach in manufacturing, analytics will play a critical role in not only meeting regulatory requirements but also in building needed collaboration between product development and manufacturing groups.

Interphex, New York, NY (Apr. 24)-Although the second revision of 21 CFR Part 11, the Electronic Records and Signatures Rule, has not been finalized, there is some progress being made. This was the topic of a presentation given by John English, manager of computer system validation for BE&K BioPharm at today?s Interphex Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Conference and Exhibition.

Lyon, France (Apr. 17)-Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccine division of the Sanofi-Aventis Group, announced that the US Food and Drug Administration has licensed its H5N1 vaccine, making it the first avian-influenza vaccine for humans in the United States.

Rockville, MD (Apr. 5)-The US Food and Drug Administration concluded its reinspection of Wyeth?s manufacturing facility in Guayama, Puerto Rico. Conditions at the Guayama facility prompted a Warning Letter in May 2006.

Brussels, Belgium (Mar. 22)-The European Commission?s (EC) Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry (Brussels, Belgium) is asking manufacturers, distributors, and users of human-pharmaceutical excipients to participate in an online questionnaire on the effect of various policy options. Responses will be used to prepare a directive on good manufacturing practices (GMPs) for certain excipients.

Rockville, MD (Mar. 1)-The number of US Food and Drug Administration inspections of biologic and drug-manufacturing facilities declined to 4237 in fiscal 2006, according to a report by the Office of Regulatory Affairs.

Forty years ago, investors and business speculators shuddered at the prospect of working with India's pharmaceutical industry. The industry was plagued by archaic patent laws and insufficient infrastructure, and only multinational companies (MNCs) were able to exploit its crude resources and monopolistic legal framework. Struggling in the shadows of these MNCs were the Indian pharmaceutical entrepreneurs and a handful of producers. Because more than 70% of the pharmaceutical market value was in the hands of MNCs, India's indigenous pharmaceutical industry was floundering. Its amount of exports was negligible, and the domestic market outlook was bleak because of onerous government regulation.

BIO Raises Concerns About Studies on Follow-On Biologics; Green Chemistry Reduces Costs and Waste; Novel Polymer–DNA Delivery System; WHO Stresses Lack of Capacity for Pandemic Flu Vaccine; EGA Concerned About Regulatory Workload in Approving Generics

The enactment of the Indian Patents Act of 1970, implemented in 1972, provided an open platform to the Indian pharmaceutical industry to adopt process patents to manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and formulations without fear of infringement of product patents. This resulted in a phenomenal growth in the number of pharmaceutical manufacturing units, from 2257 in 1970, to 5156 in 1980, 16,000 in 1990, and more than 23,000 in 2005. This was accompanied by a steep increase in investment from Rs. 2.25 billion (approx. $250 million US) in 1973, to Rs. 45 billion (approx. $1 billion US) in 2002–03. The prices of the most advanced drugs dropped significantly in India, leading the Indian pharma sector to become more competitive while remaining extremely cost effective in the global market.

The concept of Acceptable Analytical Practices (AAPs) was developed by the Analytical Technical Group of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to share information about how the pharmaceutical industry has implemented chemistry, manufacturing, and controls and quality guidances of the International Conference on Harmonization and worldwide regulatory authorities. The AAP process identifies and addresses critical issues in which guidance is lacking, ambiguous, or contradictory. AAPs were designed to provide a forum where one could learn from the experience of experts in pharmaceutical analysis and enhance the understanding of analytical practices that reflect good science and sound regulatory compliance. This article summarizes the discussion points from a meeting regarding the Justification of Specifications topic.

Mishaps in packaging labels serve as a reminder: the recall is in the details.

FDA is buried in postapproval manufacturing submissions and seeks to reduce the scope of changes that require agency scrutiny.

This article considers the distinction among the terms qualification, validation, and verification in the context of pharmacopeial usage.A recommendation for a standardized usage of the terms validation and verification is provided,and general requirements for validation and verification activities are given.The article also emphasizes the importance of knowing when validation or verification is necessary relative to the use of a method to satisfy pharmacopeial article requirements (for which a monograph exists in the pharmacopeia) or for nonpharmacopeial use.

Indian pharmaceutical machine manufacturers (IPMMs) are exceptional among their foreign counterparts. Historically similar to the Chinese with regard to copycat practices, patent infringements, and substandard quality, the IPMMs have made great strides in innovation and collaboration to break free from the shackles of this paradigm.

Missed or late calibration dates can accumulate, and even if the equipment is labelled appropriately, it can suggest poor management of resources and priorities.

Rockville, MD (Mar. 1)-Sending Warning Letters to 8 manufacturers and 12 distributors, The US Food and Drug Administration ordered a stop to the manufacture and distribution of unapproved drug products containing ergotamine tartrate.

Just because the wheels are turning doesn't mean they're going forward.

The proposed rule would impose new record-keeping requirements on some 1200 manufacturing establishments.

The authors describe the methods by which precise analyses of stable-isotopic abundances can be used in security and forensic applications for pharmaceutical materials. These methods include product and process authentication of raw materials, pharmaceutical intermediates, drug substances, formulated drug products, and synthetic pathways. Collectively, these methods can be used to investigate and mitigate patent infringement. In the future, more complete examples will be presented containing full isotopic results and the application of the methods described in this article.

FDA's new safety program, Critical Path Initiative, and user-fee proposal seek to reinvigorate pharmaceutical R&D.

Washington, DC (Feb. 22)-The Biotechnology Industry Organization criticized two separate studies respectively released by the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association and Express Scripts, Inc. regarding the cost-savings, interchangeability, and market penetration of follow-on biologics.

Brussels (Feb. 13)-The European Generic Medicines Association raised concerns over what it terms ?the serious lack? of resources available to member states in the European Union (EU) to deal with the regulatory workload and bottleneck in new registrations caused by the new Decentralized Procedure (DCP) for approving drugs in Europe.

Rockville, MD (Jan. 5)-The US Food and Drug Administration issued a Warning Letter to Bell-More Laboratories following the agency?s August 2006 inspection of the company?s Hampstead pharmaceutical facility.