Understanding and applying regulatory guidance on the nonclinical development of biotechnology-derived pharmaceuticals

Regulation of Stem Cell-Based Research in India in Comparison with the US, EU and other Asian Countries: Current Issues and Future Perspectives

Stem cell therapy is applicable for repair and replacement of damaged cells and tissues. Apart from transplanting cells to the body, the stem cell therapy directs them to grow new and healthy tissues. Stem cells in the area of regenerative medicines hold tremendous promise that may help to regenerate the damaged tissues and heal various diseases like multiple sclerosis, heart diseases, Parkinson's disease, and so on. To prove the safety, efficacy, and for the requirement of a licence for manufacturing and sale, all the stem cell therapies should pass the required criteria and undergo certain examinations of the regulatory agencies. The regulatory authorities review the manufacturing procedures of products to assure its purity and potency. This review summarizes the comparative critical evaluations of existing regulations and developments on the stem cells research in India, USA, EU and Asian regions and also discusses the challenges that have to be overcome and the important points that should be understood to position India as a source of the perspective nation in stem cells around the world.

A regulatory perspective of clinical trial applications for biological products with particular emphasis on Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs)

The safety of trial subjects is the tenet that guides the regulatory assessment of a Clinical Trial Authorization application and applies equally to trials involving small molecules and those with biological/biotechnological products, including Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products. The objective of a regulator is to ensure that the potential risk faced by a trial subject is outweighed by the potential benefit to them from taking part in the trial. The focus of the application review is to assess whether risks have been identified and appropriate steps taken to alleviate these as much as possible. Other factors are also taken into account during a review, such as regulatory requirements, and emerging non-clinical and clinical data from other trials on the same or similar products. This paper examines the regulatory review process of a Clinical Trial Authorization application from the perspectives of Quality, Non-Clinical and Clinical Regulatory Assessors at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. It should be noted that each perspective has highlighted specific issues from their individual competence and that these can be different between the disciplines.

Bridging the gap: facilities and technologies for development of early stage therapeutic mAb candidates

Therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) currently dominate the biologics marketplace. Development of a new therapeutic mAb candidate is a complex, multistep process and early stages of development typically begin in an academic research environment. Recently, a number of facilities and initiatives have been launched to aid researchers along this difficult path and facilitate progression of the next mAb blockbuster. Complementing this, there has been a renewed interest from the pharmaceutical industry to reconnect with academia in order to boost dwindling pipelines and encourage innovation. In this review, we examine the steps required to take a therapeutic mAb from discovery through early stage preclinical development and toward becoming a feasible clinical candidate. Discussion of the technologies used for mAb discovery, production in mammalian cells and innovations in single-use bioprocessing is included. We also examine regulatory requirements for product quality and characterization that should be considered at the earliest stages of mAb development. We provide details on the facilities available to help researchers and small-biotech build value into early stage product development, and include examples from within our own facility of how technologies are utilized and an analysis of our client base.

Pre-clinical strategies and safety issues in developing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies

Although mAbs present a different set of challenges from other product classes, and the pre-clinical safety evaluation may need to be more extensive than for other medicinal products to overcome the limited predictive value of conventional pre-clinical test systems, the level of risk associated with first administration to human subjects can be effectively mitigated. This article seeks to provide a systematic approach to identifying and addressing the pertinent risks relative to the characteristics of the particular mAb product before the first administration to human subjects.

Overview of the nonclinical quality and toxicology testing for recombinant biopharmaceuticals produced in mammalian cells

Biopharmaceuticals represent significant advances in therapeutic approaches for unmet medical needs, and increasingly, traditional pharmaceutical firms have been incorporating biotechnology capabilities into their product portfolios. There are some differences in the overall safety testing paradigms for small molecules and biopharmaceuticals, this safety testing including both quality and toxicology aspects. These differences are associated with both the manufacturing processes involved and the molecules themselves. For example, for biopharmaceuticals, living cells represent the factories for synthesizing complex molecular entities. As a result of this, safety testing for this class of drugs includes adventitious agent testing (e.g. viral, mycoplasma, transmissible spongiform encephalopathy agents) not normally needed for small molecules. Also, strategies for nonclinical toxicology testing of biopharmaceuticals differ from the paradigms used for small molecules and often need to be defined on a case-by-case basis, primarily taking into consideration species cross-reactivity attributes of the molecule of interest. Certain studies required for small molecules are not applicable to most biopharmaceuticals (i.e. genotoxicity testing, testing for interactions with the hERG channel). This manuscript provides an overview of both the quality and nonclinical toxicology testing for these mammalian-cell-derived products, two elements pivotal to the overall nonclinical assessment of the safety of these biopharmaceutical products.

Carcinogenicity assessments of biotechnology-derived pharmaceuticals: a review of approved molecules and best practice recommendations

An important safety consideration for developing new therapeutics is assessing the potential that the therapy will increase the risk of cancer. For biotherapeutics, traditional two-year rodent bioassays are often not scientifically applicable or feasible. This paper is a collaborative effort of industry toxicologists to review past and current practice regarding carcinogenicity assessments of biotherapeutics and to provide recommendations. Publicly available information on eighty marketed protein biotherapeutics was reviewed. In this review, no assessments related to carcinogenicity or tumor growth promotion were identified for fifty-one of the eighty molecules. For the twenty-nine biotherapeutics in which assessments related to carcinogenicity were identified, various experimental approaches were employed. This review also discusses several key principles to aid in the assessment of carcinogenic potential, including (1) careful consideration of mechanism of action to identify theoretical risks, (2) careful investigation of existing data for indications of proliferative or immunosuppressive potential, and (3) characterization of any proliferative or immunosuppressive signals detected. Traditional two-year carcinogenicity assays should not be considered as the default method for assessing the carcinogenicity potential of biotherapeutics. If experimentation is considered warranted, it should be hypothesis driven and may include a variety of experimental models. Ultimately, it is important that preclinical data provide useful guidance in product labeling.

Antidrug antibody assay validation: industry survey results

Immunogenicity of biopharmaceutical products has attracted considerable attention from the industrial, academia, and regulatory organizations. Many methods exist to detect and characterize level of antidrug antibody response in patients. Still, additional work is required to harmonize various approaches used throughout the industry. This review presents results of a survey sponsored by the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists that was designed to collect relevant information and to understand various methods used throughout the bioanalytical field for the detection and evaluation of antidrug antibody responses.

Preclinical safety testing of monoclonal antibodies: the significance of species relevance

Selecting a pharmacologically relevant animal species for testing the safety and toxicity of novel monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies to support clinical testing can be challenging. Frequently, the species of choice is the primate. With the increased number of mAbs in the pharmaceutical pipeline, this has significant implications for primate use, and so raises several important scientific, ethical and economic issues. Here, following a recent international workshop held to debate this topic, we discuss issues in the preclinical testing of mAbs, with a particular focus on species relevance and primate use, and provide suggestions for how these issues might be addressed.