GMP News - APIs and Excipients

The "Best practices guide for managing suppliers of API manufacturers" was finalised by the "APIC Supplier Management Task Force" in March 2024 and is now available on the APIC website. It emerged from the document "Supplier Qualification and Management Guideline", which was first published in 2009, and now replaces it in its entirety.

In April 2024, the U.S. FDA issued a Warning Letter on its webpage to the Australian company "Antaria Pty. Ltd." after having inspected its site in November 2023. According to the Warning Letter the company missed to have an appropriate stability program for its API in place.

In March 2024, the ECHA (European Chemicals Agency) published the next steps of its working groups with regard to the restriction of "PFAS" (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in Europe on its website.

At the beginning of April 2024, the draft document "Data Integrity for In Vivo Bioavailability and Bioequivalence Studies" was published on the US FDA website and is now available for comment for 60 days. The document is intended to assist applicants and marketing authorisation holders in the area of data integrity for the clinical and bioanalytical part of bioequivalence and bioavailability studies.

The revision 1 of the document "Quality overall summary (QOS) template for CEP applications", which was updated in January, has been published on the EDQM website. The document was first published in 2015 and is intended to provide assistance for CEP applicants.

A court in the UK has sentenced a pharmaceutical company and its former director to heavy fines. The defendant had admitted to knowingly submitting falsified stability data to the MHRA in order to obtain a Marketing Authorization for a product. This was preceded by years of investigation by the authority.

The nitrosamine Q&A document "Questions and answers for marketing authorization holders/applicants on the CHMP Opinion for the Article 5(3) of Regulation (EC) No 726/2004 referral on nitrosamine impurities in human medicinal products" of the EMA/CMDh contains three annexes (Appendix 1-3) in its current version of October 2023. In February 2024, Appendix 1 was updated again and fifteen new substances were added.