FDA's Justina A. Molzon on ICH and Harmonization

In late October, the steering committee and expert working groups of the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) met in St. Louis, Missouri. As already reported by Pharmaceutical Technology, a major success of the meeting was the adoption of several annexes to the Q4B guideline on pharmacopeial texts (see back story).

ICH, which will celebrate its 20th anniversary in 2010, has come quite a long way since it was founded. Established in 1990 as a venue for pharmaceutical regulators and industry experts around the world to discuss how to harmonize the safety, quality, and efficacy of medicinal products, the conference has adopted and begun to implement more than 60 guidelines and guideline annexes. The key to ICH’s success is implementation, says Justina A. Molzon. “ICH owes its  success as a harmonization initiative to a very dedicated Secretariat and the efforts of its expert working groups to generate science-based consensus guidelines ” she says.

Molzon, a captain in the US public health service commissioned corps, is the associate director for international programs at the US Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). She is CDER's ICH steering committee representative and also serves on ICH's Global Cooperation Group (GCG) and independent Regulators Forum.

Molzon compared ICH with two other global harmonization bodies, the World Health Organization and the Pan American Network on Drug Regulatory Harmonization (PANDRH), as part of a recently published book by Springer, Pharmaceutical Stability Testing to Support Global Markets. Although ICH represents what Molzon calls the “corporate” version of the three bodies, its advantage is that it now has “a common regulatory language in the common technical document (CTD) and input that other countries can use. We are at a point where ICH can focus on discussing implementation and dissemination of well-established scientific guidances with interested countries that were not originally involved in the ICH process thereby sharing perceived benefits with regulatory colleagues.”

The founding parties and steering-committee members of ICH include: the EU, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare; the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, FDA, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). But with the pharmaceutical industry expanding across the entire globe, the conference established in 1999 the Global Cooperation Group as a subcommittee to share ICH information and guidelines with countries and groups that are not official parties to the ICH organization.

GCG members are able to attend ICH meetings at the steering-committee and working-group level. Members include the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Gulf Cooperation Countries, PANDRH, and the Southern African Development Community.

The GCG is essentially a “clearinghouse for training,” says Molzon. For example, the group recently put together a training program in Beijing on good manufacturing practices and quality implementation (ICH Q8, Q9, and Q10). “We make sure that things are done multilaterally so that everyone has a role to play,” she adds.

Despite the existence of the GCG, ICH regulators decided more was needed to take harmonization to the next level. So in June 2008, a Regulators Forum was established. Although the forum is not technically part of ICH, its meetings are held in conjunction with ICH meetings and the same groups that participate in the GCG also participate in the Regulators Forum. In addition, individual countries are represented in the forum, including Australia, Brazil, China, Chinese Tapei, India, Korea, Russia, and Singapore.

“Regulators only can talk about how they are implementing things, discussing what they do, how they trained their staff, and so forth,” says Molzon about the forum. Currently, forum participants are focusing on how they conduct reviews within their own regulatory bodies. Ever since ICH adopted the CTD-and now the electronic CTD-for filings in 2000, it makes sense that regulators review the information in a similar way as well, explains Molzon.

Looking ahead, both the GCG and Regulators Forum would like to bring in additional countries to extend the reach of harmonization. If a country is interested in implementing ICH guidelines and requests to be involved, they can be, says Molzon.