For all Sponsors submitting INDs, NDAs, ANDAs, BLAs, and supplements, and the bioanalytical laboratories analyzing and reporting the data to support these submissions, the FDA just issued its Guidance for Industry, “Evaluation of Internal Standard Responses During Chromatographic Bioanalysis: Questions and Answers.” The Q&A guidance contains five questions, along with the Agency’s current thinking on […]
It is paramount that a Quality Control laboratory has a calibration and preventative maintenance program for the laboratory instrumentation so that there is assurance that the instrumentation continues to be “fit for purpose” and that there is confidence in the accuracy and reliability of all analytical instruments. There should be a controlled, comprehensive list of […]
When it comes to ice cream and desserts, I must admit the more the better in my opinion. The same, however, doesn’t hold true for laboratory testing and the resultant data. All testing performed and data generated must be accountable to ensure the integrity of the data. Performing extra testing, even if with all good […]
Like death and taxes, eventually every pharmaceutical testing laboratory will get a regulatory agency inspection. The anticipation of a regulatory inspection will instill great angst even within the most compliant laboratories. The anticipated inspection might be a periodic inspection, but most often is a Pre-Approval Inspection (PAI). The anxiety about an impending inspection often triggers […]
The pre-publication page of the Federal Register Notice posted today (here) a reopening of the comment period for the draft guidance Quality Considerations for Continuous Manufacturing which was originally released February 27, 2019. That guidance can be found here . While some (but not too many) firms have embraced the concept of continuous manufacturing, others […]
This post was co-authored by Thu Truong, J.D., Senior Associate, Science and Technology Group, and Ron George, Ph.D, Director, Science and Technology Group Prior to USP 42 – NF 37 (effective April 30, 2019), USP Chapter <197>, Spectroscopy Identification Tests, stated, “The IR absorption spectrum of a substance, compared with that obtained concomitantly for the […]
The FDA’s recently published draft guidance titled Development of Therapeutic Protein Biosimilars: Comparative Analytical Assessment and other Quality-Related Considerations (here) is a significant improvement over the withdrawn 2012 guidance (i.e., Quality Considerations in Demonstrating Biosimilarity to a Reference Protein Product) that it replaced. The increased level of detail and wider breadth of topics gives a […]
From the news stories on the price fixing suits, to the reported revelations about quality in the generic drug industry, or to the publication of a book titled “Bottle of Lies”, it has not been a good start to the news cycle for the generic drug industry this week. The report on price fixing was […]
The issue of the use of biosimilars and their uptake in the market has been a discussion point since the first biosimilar was approved in 2015. Today, the FDA issued a long-awaited guidance on how a firm can demonstrate interchangeability of a biosimilar to its reference licensed product. The guidance is titled Considerations in Demonstrating […]
Well, for us old folks, change is always something that makes us queasy. The newly-designed FDA website stirred those feeling all over again as we try to navigate the new links and find the information that was once at our fingertips (or at least in our bookmarks). There were some wrong turns and some dead […]
