Decision Support for Excipient Risk Assessment in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

A Rational Hierarchy to Capture Raw Material Attribute Variability in the Pharmaceutical Drug Product Development and Manufacturing Lifecycle

Assessing the robustness of a drug product formulation and manufacturing process to variations in raw material (RM) properties is an essential aspect of pharmaceutical product development. Motivated by the need to demonstrate understanding of attribute-performance relationships at the time of new product registration and for subsequent process maintenance, we review practices to explore RM variations. We describe limitations that can arise when active ingredients and excipients invariably undergo changes during a drug product lifecycle. Historical approaches, such as Quality-by-Design (QbD) experiments, are useful for initial evaluations but can be inefficient and cumbersome to maintain once commercial manufacturing commences. The relatively miniscule data sets accessible in product development - used to predict response to a hypothetical risk of variation - become less relevant as real-world experience of actual variability in the commercial landscape grows. Based on our observations of development and manufacturing, we instead propose a holistic framework exploiting a hierarchy of RM variability, and challenge this with common failure modes. By explicitly incorporating higher ranking RM variations as perturbations, material-conserving experiments are shown to provide powerful and enduring robustness data. Case studies illustrate how correctly contextualizing such data in formulation and process development can avoid the traps of historical QbD approaches and become valuable for evaluating changes occurring later in the drug product lifecycle.

Decision Support for Excipient Risk Assessment in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

Excipients have always been a key input into pharmaceutical products, profoundly affecting product quality. Currently, most of our knowledge of excipient critical quality attributes is empirical, gained through experience, and shared through publications and other sources. The behavior of excipients is complicated, with many different failure modes that depend on the type of dosage form. Even within the same dosage form, there can be multiple failure modes depending on the manufacturing method. This complex behavior creates many possible combinations to assess when designing a formulation or evaluating regulatory submissions. Formulation science could be improved if data from different sources could be made widely available through an interactive system using a consistent, structured format to help formulators and regulators assess the risk of excipient usage for a particular dosage form with a particular manufacturing method. This paper describes a decision support system that was created for assessing excipient risk in different types of formulations and considering different types of manufacturing methods, dosage forms, and excipient functionality. The Excipient Risk Assessment System consists of a database that stores knowledge about factors that affect formulation design and a decision support processor that manages selections for creating formulation scenarios and assigning risk. Formulation and risk assessment data are provided by formulation science experts. This enables the system to assess compatibility among excipients, functionality, dosage forms, and manufacturing methods selected for formulations. The interface guides users through the creation of formulation scenarios and displays customized, interactive risk assessment reports for users to search and explore.