Are you ready to give the FDA more? “What?” you ask, as a manufacturer of API and finished goods. Are you ready to give them more data and information about your manufacturing process? You think, “Don’t they get all the necessary information from me during their inspections and from my filings?” Well, the answer is yes and no.

The draft guidance document provides recommendations regarding the testing for RCR during the manufacture of retroviral vector-based gene therapy products, and for follow-up monitoring of patients who have received retroviral vector-based gene therapy products.

The FDA recently issued for public comment six draft guidance documents intended to serve as part of a modern, comprehensive framework for how CBER will help advance the field of gene therapy. This article summarizes the first of those draft guidances, Chemistry, Manufacturing, and Control (CMC) Information for Human Gene Therapy Investigational New Drug Applications (INDs).

The Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) will soon deliver another big impact to both pharmaceutical manufacturers/marketing authorization holders (MAHs) and distributors, with requirements for serialized product verification to comply with the next phase of requirements coming into effect Nov. 27, 2019.

Adverse events (a suspected reaction to the API or to the API in combination with prescribed medicines or environmental factors) are, naturally, a challenging situation for patients in a clinical trial and may, in rare cases, become severe or even fatal. For sponsors, contract research organizations (CROs), and logistics partners, early notification and accurate information is vital to understanding and responding to a suspected adverse event. What happens if the patient goes off protocol and turns to social media?

Writing effective IQ/OQ/PQ protocols is a must for following the regulations required by the FDA for equipment, systems, and utilities to demonstrate suitability for the intended use and to operate according to their design and functional specifications. In order to prove the requirements are met, qualification protocols have to be written and followed.

The FDA recently revamped the methods it uses to determine which foreign and domestic drug manufacturing sites warrant inspection or other types of surveillance and at what frequency. The agency also introduced a multiyear resource planning process that will enable it to better use resources and plan frequencies of product sampling as well as inspections.

Achieving inspection readiness means that during all stages of a clinical trial, a regulatory inspector would be able to walk into the building and reconstruct the trial using only the documents and metadata present in the trial master file (TMF). Although the concept of an inspection-ready TMF may be simply described, inspection readiness is not easily achieved. The failure to achieve an inspection-ready TMF continues to be an area of growing risk for the clinical research industry.

A range of factors — including small patient populations, complex manufacturing processes, and lack of specialized expertise — are positioned to both drive up costs and require new options for stakeholder engagement and risk sharing along the development pathway. New approaches in development are needed to support the next generation of novel drugs on the horizon.

Manufacturers, suppliers, and regulators have recognized that introducing new technologies also introduces a degree of unfamiliarity and uncertainty.