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20 April 2015 | By Dave Elder, GlaxoSmithKline and JPAG
Increasing research and development costs, low productivity, reduced product life cycles, governmental pricing containment, convergence of technologies and increasing regulatory oversight are challenges that increasingly provoke pharmaceutical companies into making precompetitive collaborations with other organisations.
20 April 2015 | By Roger A. Stroud, R Stroud Pharmaceutical Quality Solutions Limited
Increasing numbers of pharmaceutical companies are considering outsourcing in the area of analytical and microbiological testing, from the very smallest start-up, virtual, or small company up to the largest multinational. This article will examine the factors that lead to a company deciding to outsource, and provides invaluable guidance on the…
20 April 2015 | By Ulrich Kaiser, University of Zurich / Susan Mendez, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research / Thomas Rønde, Copenhagen Business School / Hannes Ullrich, DIW Berlin and University of Zurich
Reference price systems for prescription drugs have found widespread use as cost containment tools. Under such regulatory regimes, patients co-pay a fraction of the difference between pharmacy retail price of the drug and a reference price. Reference prices are either externally (based on drug prices in other countries) or internally…
20 April 2015 | By Guenther Gapp, Lachman Consulting Ltd/Independent Consultant
Several years ago, microbiologist Guenther Gapp created a new sterile risk assessment tool (based on a hazard operability analysis [HAZOP] approach) to identify and reduce the microbial contamination and compliance risk of aseptically-produced sterile products and production plants. The following article describes the operating principle of three risk analysis tools…
The methods for monitoring air in cleanroom environments: viable counting techniques (settle plates and biological air samplers) and particle counters, are long established technologies and have been widely used in pharmaceutical manufacturing environments for decades. Although innovations have taken place with both particle counters and biological air samplers, primarily in…
20 April 2015 | By Ivo Backx, Manager, Business & Project Development for the Pharmaceutical Industry, Siemens
Ivo Backx of Siemens discusses continuous processing in the context of the company’s Simatic PCS 7 system and PAT software...
20 April 2015 | By Ravendra Singh, Marianthi Ierapetritou and Rohit Ramachandran: Rutgers University
Continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing together with process analytical technology (PAT) provides a suitable platform for automatic feed-forward/feed-back (FF/FB) control of the end product quality as desired by quality by design (QbD)-based efficient manufacturing. The precise control of the quality of the pharmaceutical product requires proactive, corrective actions on the process/raw material…
High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is a powerful separation technique due to its high accuracy, precision, versatility and robustness. In the development of pharmaceuticals, it is no doubt that LC is a key technology in the quality control of pharmaceuticals and pharmacokinetic studies and in the analysis of complex biological compounds…
In Issue #1 2015: Regulatory Insight, Biologics, NIR in-depth focus, Raman in-depth focus, PAT, Drug Delivery, Microbiology Series and much more...
The World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2010 described counterfeit medicines as those which are “Deliberately and fraudulently mislabelled with respect to identity and/or source. Counterfeiting can apply to both branded and generic products and counterfeit products may include products with the correct ingredients or with the wrong ingredients, without active…
10 March 2015 | By Özge Atılgan Karakulak and Zeynep Koray, Gün + Partners
You are waiting in line, trying to decipher several different languages spoken around you: English, Dutch, German, Arabic, French… This scene is not from an airport but rather from a Turkish hospital: thousands of foreigners, communicating through translators, visit healthcare institutions every day and numbers are increasing exponentially; in the…
10 March 2015 | By Michael Weichel, Kristina Ellwanger, Ivica Fucek, Stefan H.J. Knackmuss, Erich Rajkovic, Uwe Reusch, Claudia Wall, and Eugene A. Zhukovsky, Affimed Therapeutics AG
The bi-specific antibody format is becoming the preferred antibody modality for current development projects in the pharmaceutical industry. This is due to an unsurpassed increase in functional activity relative to traditional mono-specific monoclonal antibodies, and a breakthrough in manufacturability enabled by novel designs. One such bi-specific format, the TandAb, produces…
10 March 2015 | By Michael Rommerskirchen, Boehringer Ingelheim
Nowadays, professional quality and process data trending is key for science-based pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) issued revised process validation guidance to enforce recurring data analysis as a regulatory core requirement1,2: Periodic product and process monitoring, also known…
10 March 2015 | By Andrew R. Martin and Warren H. Finlay, University of Alberta
The development of orally-inhaled drug products is a complex endeavour spanning multiple technical and medical fields. For the treatment of respiratory diseases such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the inhalation delivery route permits the drug to be directly targeted to the afflicted organ, namely the lung. As…
Aqueous, multiple-use, non-sterile drug products are susceptible to microbial contamination during their shelf life. To protect these products from this potential hazard to patients, they are formulated with antimicrobial preservatives. Other product attributes employed using the hurdle concept to prevent microbial contamination include: low pH, low redox potential, reduced storage…
