For the last several years, there has been a push in the industry to take a systematic approach and design quality into your systems and processes by establishing up front requirements such as QTPP for process validation and ATP for analytical methods. Such an approach provides invaluable benefits to the public whereby, the manufacturer has […]
ICH Q7 refers to the need to establish the impurity profile for an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (API): “An impurity profile describing the identified and unidentified impurities present in a typical batch produced by a specific controlled production process should normally be established for each API. The impurity profile should include the identity or some qualitative […]
The FDA has issued a white paper on “CDER’s Quality Management Maturity (QMM) Program: Practice Areas and Prototype Assessment Protocol Development.” The paper details a program the center intends to establish whereby the goal is to promote QMM throughout the industry. Lachman recently issued a blog relating to this initiative that can be found here. […]
Reference standards are used ubiquitously within a Quality Control laboratory and are integral to many test procedures. A laboratory should have defined controls for the use, handling, inventory management, and characterization of these standards, as well as consulting the WHO’s Annex 3 for “General guidelines for the establishment, maintenance, and distribution of chemical reference substances,” which […]
When a firm is evaluating the effectiveness of their investigation program (as part of assessing the effectiveness of the Quality Management System (QMS)) the focus tends to be towards evaluating the quality / robustness of the resulting investigations. However, one of the questions that should also be asked is are investigations being initiated when required? […]
CDER has issued the final guidance, ICH Q13 Continuous Manufacturing of Drug Substances and Drug Products, which provides for the development, implementation, operation, and lifecycle management of continuous manufacturing (CM), applying to both drug substances and drug products for chemical entities, therapeutic proteins for new products, and conversion of existing products. A copy of the guidance […]
Most companies will recognize and state that their most important assets are the people who work for them, which is naturally also the case for the pharmaceutical industry. It goes without saying that the number of staff and their competency can have a consequential impact on product quality/patient safety, and this is recognized by health […]
ICH Q10 (here) states the following as it relates to outsourcing activities and purchasing materials (hereafter referred to as third party): “The pharmaceutical quality system, including the management responsibilities described in this section, extends to the control and review of any outsourced activities and quality of purchased materials. The pharmaceutical company is ultimately responsible to […]
Processing of the laboratory instrumentation output such as the processing of chromatographic raw data continues to be a focus of global health agency investigators. This is not surprising, as the investigator will be aware of the Data Integrity (DI) risks with such a manual operation, where there is the potential of selectively adjusting integration settings […]
The CDER has issued a final guidance titled Comparability Protocols for Postapproval Changes to the Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Controls Information in an NDA, ANDA, or BLA (here), addressing the role of comparability protocols (CPs) for post-approval changes to the CMC sections of NDAs, ANDAs, and BLAs where the CP is a prospectively written plan for […]
