The European Union’s (EU) Falsified Medicines (FMD) Directive 2011/62/EU amends Directive 2001/83/EC to safeguard public health by protecting the pharmaceutical supply chain from infiltration by falsified (or counterfeit) medicines. It also introduces new rules to more rigorously regulate the supply chain.
It has never been clear whether visual inspection is reliable since it has never actually been validated. If it can be validated, then the use of this technique for release of equipment would be justified and might even be used in place of traditional swab methods, which take substantial amounts of time and resources to develop, validate, and perform.
Probably the most significant concern for anyone responsible for implementing, deploying, and maintaining a quality management system is the integration of risk-based thinking. While the concept of risk management is not new, previous practice was more reactionary, primarily focusing on detection after the fact, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and preventing recurrence of the failure. Contemporary thinking places the emphasis on considering risks up front (prevention) and having a solid approach to address risk in planning, managing, and driving actions.
New York City has long aspired to become a life sciences hub, but while the city seems to have all the elements necessary to foster such industry growth, it has continually fallen short of this goal. New York currently ranks a distant third behind both Greater Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area, and there’s some work to do if it hopes to catch up.
There is always a lot of discussion and debate related to the challenges faced by companies within the industry broadly described as life sciences. Price pressure for mature pharmaceutical products, shortage of supply for critical vaccines and other life-saving compounds, pipeline management for promising molecules and therapies — the list goes on. There are many proposed approaches to address these challenges, all with a common thread: Adopting a life cycle management approach will assist in identifying risk factors and constraints and provide structure and control, with a clearly defined methodology to identify and mitigate risk.
In part 1 of our article on biocontainment, we discussed the history of biocontainment as an outgrowth of medical research, especially the effort to develop vaccines for various worldwide diseases. We provided some definition of the biosafety levels (BSLs) established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) based on risk considerations. We also discussed the regulatory regime for biological agents and, specifically, for designing a facility for an FDA or EU regulated product within the confines of the safety practices dictated by the CDC and design requirements of the NIH.
Serialization in the pharmaceutical sector is a direct response to the problems of counterfeit, stolen, and gray-market drugs. There's been a huge incentive for counterfeiters to duplicate high-profit-margin products. According to the 2016 Brand Protection and Product Traceability Market Research Report from PMMI, the black market for counterfeit drugs is about $75 billion annually.
This article discusses a strategy to implement risk management during the process design stage of process validation for quality product, and to use as a proactive means of addressing quality controls during the subsequent stages of development.
In today’s world of ever-increasing regulatory scrutiny on pharmaceutical quality we have all witnessed first-hand the public relations nightmare of adverse events, drug recalls, and even company closures. In response, pharma companies have set stricter rules and regulations for their employees to follow, to ensure they remain in compliance with regulators and avoid negative inspection results. This focus on quality — quality of the process, quality of the batch, quality of the final product, or even the quality of the whole operation — has led many manufacturers to seek establishment of a culture of quality among their employees.
There have been considerable updates in the Brexit situation since April 2017, including, the surprising result of the U.K. general election. If anything, news regarding Brexit and the biopharma industry has started to heat up in recent months, and there have been a number of relevant developments that manufacturers must keep their eye on.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|