Wednesday, September 23, 2009

ICH Guidelines Show Their Age (and Difficulty)

Throughout this year, our contributing editor Emil Ciurczak has undertaken a series of articles on the need to update ICH guidances--as, he points out, most of them were developed before the PAT/QbD era in pharma. Emil looks at the guidances through a PAT/QbD lens and offers up ways that they'll need revising (when ICH has time to get around to it).

Thus far he has tackled Q2 (R1), Q7A, and Q6A.

His latest analysis is of ICH Q8. We know what you're thinking--Q8 is one of the seminal documents of QbD. True, says Ciurczak: It's not so much that it needs revising, but that it needs ongoing interpretation. Few in the industry read Q8 in full, he notes, and it seems that few interpret it in quite the same way.

If Ciurczak is game, to be continued . . .

--Paul Thomas

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