In teaching, research and talking to industry professionals, I am often tempted to refer to “high technology” industries, “technology startups” and the like. This would tend to emphasize the commonality between IT and biotech.
And then there are days like Friday, when I’m reminded that biotech — and human health more generally — is completely different.
The occasion was an event on pharmaceutical quality, organized by KGI’s student chapter of the Parenteral Drug Association, a professional organization concerned with drug quality and safety issues.
The students invited three industry speakers.
First up was Susan Weber of Baxter introduced us to the principles of Quality by Design, i.e. start from a quality goal and work back through the entire design, development an production process. The ideas are more than 20 years old, but apparently have recently have begun to influence pharmaceutical manufacturing in the US.
The second speaker was Marsha Hardiman, a consultant for Concordia Valsource. After showing a stunning video by the American Society for Quality on the consequences of quality failures, she summarized the regulatory and process failures of the New England Compounding Center that have led to 64 deaths so far. Nothing illustrates the difference between a bad drug and a bad iPhone app.
The final speaker was James Sesic of Amgen, talking about the challenges of maintaining regulatory compliance for drugs sold in more than 100 countries.
This was the real eye-opener. We all know about the need for drug companies to spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars to get the first NDA or BLA approval. Sometimes we talk about getting the second approval — e.g. in Europe or Japan after the US. But I’ve never heard anyone talk about the rest of the world.
How does a company like Amgen handle approval in dozens of countries? The richest countries have their own large-scale regulatory systems (US, Japan, Canada, Europe), the smallest grant approval after certified approval from one of the major regulators, while a range of countries attempt to form their own regulatory judgements without a lot of resources.
On top of that, regulatory approval is required for any major change in the production process. Normally this discourages companies from making major changes, but if there’s a major improvement in the process — or the company needs to comply with new regulations — it will go through the process.
One example is getting approval to shift manufacturing to a new factory. The company will have to apply for approval in dozens of countries and cannot sell drugs in country X from the new factory until regulatory agency X has approved such production.
If a drug has several deliver modalities — concentration, IV vs. injection, etc. — then when multiplied by the disparate languages, marking requirements and other national regulations, a single blockbuster drug could be sold in 100s of SKUs. Double that with separate SKUs from the old and the new factory.
When it takes 4-6 years for all the countries to approve the change, then an Amgen needs to keep track of all those 200? 500? SKUs (for one drug) to know which SKU is legal to sell in one country.
Contrast this to the rollout of the latest iPhone, a product that (unlike software or PCs) must satisfy strict government and operator requirements to be sold in a given country. Apple launched the iPhone 5c in 10 countries in September, added 60 countries between October 25-November 1, and expects to have more than 100 countries by the end of the year (i.e. in less than 4 months).
The process of global drug regulation seems pretty inefficient, and we pay for this inefficiency through higher costs (or lack of access by smaller countries to non-blockbuster drugs). It would be nice if we could develop a drug regulatory system where the first review is highly rigorous but the remaining process is streamlined so that drug companies spend their money on development (and safety), not SAP and paperwork.
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