What is Your Favorite QbD Analytical Tool?

There's been an interesting (albeit slow to develop) discussion of late on the Quality-by-Design LinkedIn group regarding users' favorite QbD analytical tool. It would seem a very subjective topic (akin to your favorite flavor of ice cream), but the answers have ranged from NIR imaging to Excel spreadsheets ("It's great for getting agreement between teams prior to selecting process analytical techniques") to HPLC to terahertz imaging. What's yours?

Contributors to the thread offer some useful links to read more about their favorite tools.

(Apologies to the non-LinkedIn readers out there!)

--Paul Thomas

FAQ's from ICH: What's Your Take?

Some discussion has started up around ICH's Q&A document on our LinkedIn group. If you're not a registered LinkedIn user, my apologies. I will summarize these responses some time soon. In the meantime, I would love to hear other thoughts about the value of ICH's document, and any answers that you take issue with.

--Paul Thomas

QbD for Biopharma: New Course at PDA FDA Joint Conference

This year's PDA FDA Joint Regulatory Conference in D.C. in mid-September has an excellent program top to bottom. (Here's the agenda.) It will also feature a new course by Anurag Rathore (see yesterday's post on his new book) on QbD for Biopharma.

Rathore has just posted the tentative outline for the course on our LinkedIn group. If you're not a LinkedIn member, here is his overview--comments are welcome as the program is finalized.

Critical Quality Attributes (Patrick Swann): Potential CQAs for Mabs; Biological Activity Matrix; Product-related variants; Characterization of variants and setting limits (ICH Q5E); Clinical pharmacology studies; Specifications (ICH Q6B); Biological characterization

Design Space (Anurag Rathore): Clinical design space; Product design space; Process design space; Case Study I – Establishing process design space for a Pichia fermentation product; Scale down modeling; Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA); Design of Experiments (DOE); Parameter-parameter interactions; Worst case studies

Group work I (All): Group discussion to identify and list gaps attendees see with respect to molecules under commercialization at present and also legacy products.

Risk Assessment and Management (Patrick Swann): Review of historical approaches; ICH Q9 guidance; Quality risk management process; FMEA

Regulatory Aspects (Patrick Swann): OBP QbD pilot program; Observations based on review of proposals for categorizing quality attributes

Establishing Control Strategy and Lifecycle Management of Design Space (Anurag Rathore): Creating control strategy; Process validation; Filing; Process monitoring; Raw material management; Process analytical technology (PAT); Case Stud II – Multivariate analysis for a mammalian cell culture step

Group work II (All): Group discussion of gaps identified earlier