Publications by authors named "Sau L Lee"

The last decade has seen Advanced Medicines Manufacturing (AMM) progress from isolated product developments to the creation of industry-academic centres of excellence, regulatory innovation progressing leading to new standards, and product commercialisation across multiple product formats. This paper examines these developments focusing on successful applications and strategies presented at the 2023 Symposium of the International Consortium for Advanced Medicines Manufacturing (ICAMM). Despite these exemplar applications, there remain significant challenges to the sector-wide adoption of AMM technologies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A network of regulatory innovations brings a holistic approach to improving the submission, assessment, and lifecycle management of pharmaceutical quality information in the U.S. This dedicated effort in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) aims to enhance the quality assessment of submissions for new drugs, generic drugs, and biological products including biosimilars.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nutritional imbalances have been associated with a higher risk for cognitive impairment. This study determined the red blood cell (RBC) fatty acid profile of newly diagnosed mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients compared to age and gender-matched controls. There was a significant increase in palmitic acid ( < 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

These proceedings contain presentation summaries and discussion highlights from the University of Maryland Center of Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation (M-CERSI) Workshop on Co-processed API, held on July 13 and 14, 2022. This workshop examined recent advances in the use of co-processed active pharmaceutical ingredients as a technology to improve drug substance physicochemical properties and drug product manufacturing process robustness, and explored proposals for enabling commercialization of these transformative technologies. Regulatory considerations were discussed with a focus on the classification, CMC strategies, and CMC documentation supporting the use of this class of materials from clinical studies through commercialization.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Continuous manufacturing (CM) sends materials directly and continuously to the next step of a process, eliminating hold times and reducing processing times. The potential benefits of CM include improved product quality, reduced waste, lower costs, and increased manufacturing flexibility and agility. Some pharmaceutical manufacturers have been hesitant to adopt CM owing to perceived regulatory risks such as increased time to regulatory approval and market entry, more difficulty submitting postapproval changes, and higher inspectional scrutiny.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The presence and extent of left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) is a major determinant of symptoms in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). There is increasing evidence to suggest that myocardial energetic impairment represents a central mechanism leading to LVH in HCM. There is currently a significant unmet need for disease-modifying therapy that regresses LVH in HCM patients.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the last two centuries, medicines have evolved from crude herbal and botanical preparations into more complex manufacturing of sophisticated drug products and dosage forms. Along with the evolution of medicines, the manufacturing practices for their production have advanced from small-scale manual processing with simple tools to large-scale production as part of a trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. Today's pharmaceutical manufacturing technologies continue to evolve as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, robotics, and advanced computing begin to challenge the traditional approaches, practices, and business models for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the context of streamlining generic approval, this study assessed whether pharmacokinetics (PK) could elucidate the pulmonary fate of orally inhaled drug products (OIDPs). Three fluticasone propionate (FP) dry powder inhaler (DPI) formulations (A-4.5, B-3.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rapid advances have been made in developing analytical technologies for characterization of highly heterogeneous active ingredients of complex drugs, such as pentosan polysulfate (PPS), active ingredient of the drug Elmiron®, approved by the Food and Drug Administration and marketed in the United States to treat interstitial cystitis. PPS sulfated polysaccharides comprise of a repeat unit of β(1-4)-D-xylopyranoses randomly substituted by 4-O-methyl-glucopyranosyluronic acid. To define the critical quality attributes (CQAs) of such a complex drug, it is critical to develop an approach that integrates data from orthogonal analytical methodologies.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Pharmaceutical containers for parenterals have been predominantly manufactured using glass as a packaging material of choice, especially Type-I glass, since it has been regarded as a chemically inert and an effective container closure system (CCS). Nevertheless, there have been reports and recalls related to glass quality issues, such as breakage, flakes, and particles observed in marketed products. The novelty of this research is based on the knowledge gathered from our previously conducted risk assessments and establishing a comprehensive testing platform focused on risk factors for glass container failure modes and applicability to other types of pharmaceutical containers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is a trend across the pharmaceutical sector toward process intensification and continuous manufacturing to produce small-molecule drugs or biotechnology products. For biotechnology products, advancing the manufacturing technology behind upstream and downstream processes has the potential to reduce product shortages and variability, allow for production flexibility, simplify scale-up procedures, improve product quality, reduce facility footprints, increase productivity, and reduce production costs. On the upstream side of biotechnology manufacturing, continuous perfusion cell cultures are fairly well established.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Continuous manufacturing plays a key role in enabling the modernization of pharmaceutical manufacturing. The fate of this emerging technology will rely, in large part, on the regulatory implementation of this novel technology. This paper, which is based on the 2nd International Symposium on the Continuous Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals, describes not only the advances that have taken place since the first International Symposium on Continuous Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals in 2014, but the regulatory landscape that exists today.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) within the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is tracking the use of nanotechnology in drug products by building and interrogating a technical profile of products containing nanomaterials submitted to CDER. In this Analysis, data from more than 350 products show an increase in the submissions of drug products containing nanomaterials over the last two decades. Of these, 65% are investigational new drugs, 17% are new drug applications and 18% are abbreviated new drug applications, with the largest class of products being liposomal formulations intended for cancer treatments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nanocrystal technology has emerged as a valuable tool for facilitating the delivery of poorly water-soluble active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and enhancing API bioavailability. To date, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has received over 80 applications for drug products containing nanocrystals. These products can be delivered by different routes of administration and are used in a variety of therapeutic areas.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Research in the area of liposomes has grown substantially in the past few decades. Liposomes are lipid bilayer structures that can incorporate drug substances to modify the drug's pharmacokinetic profile thereby improving drug delivery. The agency has received over 400 liposomal drug product submissions (excluding combination therapies), and there are currently eight approved liposomal drug products on the US market.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Peptides are a fast growing segment in the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, the industry and regulatory agencies are increasing their focus on the regulatory path and quality considerations for peptide development and manufacturing. Although most peptides are synthetic, manufactured by solid phase synthesis, nevertheless they are complex molecules with challenging quality and regulatory aspects.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Failures surrounding pharmaceutical quality, particularly with respect to product manufacturing issues and facility remediation, account for the majority of drug shortages and product recalls in the United States. Major scientific advancements pressure established regulatory paradigms, especially in the areas of biosimilars, precision medicine, combination products, emerging manufacturing technologies, and the use of real-world data. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is increasingly globalized, prompting the need for more efficient surveillance systems for monitoring product quality.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Issues in product quality have produced recalls and caused drug shortages in United States (U.S.) in the past few years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Successful maintenance of metabolic systems relating to accurate DNA replication and repair is critical for optimal lifelong human health. Should this homeostatic balance become impaired, genomic instability events can arise, compromising the integrity of the genome, which may result in gene expression and human disease. Both genome instability and micronutrient imbalance have been identified and implicated in diseases associated with accelerated ageing which potentially leads to an increased risk for the future development of clinically defined neurodegenerative disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This article summarizes discussions at the March 2014 conference organized by the University of Florida (UF) and International Pharmaceutical Aerosol Consortium on Regulation and Science (IPAC-RS), entitled "Orlando Inhalation Conference: Approaches in International Regulation." The special focus of the conference was on global scientific and regulatory issues associated with the testing and demonstration of equivalence for the registration of orally inhaled drug products (OIDPs) in the United States, Europe, Brazil, China, and India. The scope included all types of OIDPs throughout their lifecycle, e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This article describes regulatory approaches for approval of "generic" orally inhaled drug products (OIDPs) in the United States, European Union, Brazil, China and India. While registration of a generic OIDP in any given market may require some documentation of the formulation and device similarity to the "original" product as well as comparative testing of in vitro characteristics and in vivo performance, the specific documentation approaches, tests and acceptance criteria vary by the country. This divergence is due to several factors, including unique cultural, historical, legal and economic circumstances of each region; the diverse healthcare and regulatory systems; the different definitions of key terms such as "generic" and "reference" drug; the acknowledged absence of in vitro in vivo correlations for OIDPs; and the scientific and statistical issues related to OIDP testing (such as how best to account for the batch-to-batch variability of the Reference product, whether to use average bioequivalence or population bioequivalence in the statistical analysis of results, whether to use healthy volunteers or patients for pharmacokinetic studies, and which pharmacodynamic or clinical end-points should be used).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

On September 16 and 17, 2014, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Product Quality Research Institute (PQRI) inaugurated their Conference on Evolving Product Quality. The Conference is conceived as an annual forum in which scientists from regulatory agencies, industry, and academia may exchange viewpoints and work together to advance pharmaceutical quality. This Conference Summary Report highlights key topics of this conference, including (1) risk-based approaches to pharmaceutical development, manufacturing, regulatory assessment, and post-approval changes; (2) FDA-proposed quality metrics for products, facilities, and quality management systems; (3) performance-based quality assessment and clinically relevant specifications; (4) recent developments and implementation of continuous manufacturing processes, question-based review, and European Medicines Agency (EMA)-FDA pilot for Quality-by-Design (QbD) applications; and (5) breakthrough therapies, biosimilars, and international harmonization, focusing on ICH M7 and Q3D guidelines.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF