Quality Assurance of Pharmaceutical Products

This section sums up all activities and responsibilities required to ensure that the drug that reaches the patient is safe, effective and acceptable. Moreover, this section presents the national guideline for Good Storage and Distribution Practices as well as the related self assessment. The current Good Manufacturing Practices are also available for local manufacturers.

In line with the Good Storage & Distribution Practices of Pharmaceutical Products project that has brought core improvements at the level of the Lebanese pharmaceutical warehouses, the MoPH launches today through its Quality Assurance of Pharmaceutical Products program, the Good Storage & Distribution Practices of Food Supplements guideline.

The adequate storage and distribution of Food Supplements are a crucial activities to maintain their quality and integrity, to protect consumers from potential health risks and to ensure that they are not provided with misleading information.
 

The good laboratory practice provide advice on good practices for national pharmaceutical control laboratories involved in the analysis of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), excipients and pharmaceutical products.

 
These guidelines are consistent with the requirements of the WHO guidelines for good Laboratory practices and with the requirements of the International Standard ISO/IEC 17025:2005, and provide detailed guidance for laboratories performing quality control of medicines.
National pharmaceutical quality control laboratories usually encompass essentially two types of activity:
 
Compliance testing of APIs, pharmaceutical  excipients and pharmaceutical products employing “official” methods including pharmacopoeial methods, validated analytical procedures provided by the manufacturer or validated analytical procedures developed by the laboratory; 
Investigative testing of suspicious, illegal, counterfeit substances or products, submitted for examination by medicine inspectors, customs or police.
 

The Drug Technical Document covers all the Quality, Safety and Efficacy information of a drug in a common format called the Common Technical Document (CTD). It has revolutionized the regulatory review processes, led to harmonized submission enabling the implementation of good review practices. For the pharmaceutical industries, it has eliminated the need to reformat the information for submission to the different regulatory authorities.

To improve the review and evaluation of the Module 3 and Module 5 of the Drug Technical file, the MOPH drafted the following 3 Guides:

These Guides are prepared by scientific experts and are intended to provide guidance and requirements for the preparation of the technical file to be submitted to the MOPH Technical Committee of Drugs. They are based on ICH standards and are useful for the Applicants of Generic Drug Technical file.

Biowaivers: Criteria And Requirements

A Biowaiver means that in vivo bioavailability and/or bioequivalence studies may be waived (not considered necessary for product approval). Instead of conducting expensive and time consuming in vivo studies, a dissolution test could be adopted as the surrogate basis for the decision as to whether the two pharmaceutical products are equivalent.

The risk of therapeutic inequivalence of two immediate release products can never be reduced to zero, even if a full clinical study is performed. The conclusion of comparative clinical studies, in vivo bioequivalence studies, in vitro equivalence tests and biowaivers is based on statistics and scientific data that are assumed to be representative for the products at issue.

The aim of biowaiver guidance is to reduce the risk of bioinequivalence to an acceptable level. Pharmaceutical development work aims at reducing the probability of manufacturing inequivalent formulations taking into account the critical aspects of the product at issue. In this context, the absorption phase is regarded as the critical process determining the equivalence of the pharmacokinetic profiles and thereby the therapeutic equivalence of the test and reference product.

In this report we will focus on BCS-based Biowaivers. However, other type of biowaivers had been discussed in regulation.