OnCo
ideasIdea

Mutual recognition of GMP inspections for cell, gene and radiopharmaceutical plants

Factories making living or radioactive cancer medicines are inspected separately by each country. Accepting each other's inspections would free up inspectors and speed supply.

The EU-US Mutual Recognition Agreement covers inspections of most human medicines but has been slow to extend to advanced therapy medicinal products and has no equivalent with Japan, China or India for these classes. Cell-therapy and radiopharmaceutical sites face repeated inspections by multiple agencies, each a multi-week interruption. The proposal is to extend PIC/S and MRA reliance explicitly to ATMP and radiopharmaceutical manufacturing, with a shared inspection schedule and a common inspection report template.

Hypothesis
Extending mutual recognition reduces the number of inspections per ATMP site per year by at least half and shortens the time from site readiness to multi-region supply by six months or more, with no increase in critical GMP findings.
Rationale
GMP standards for ATMPs are already largely harmonised through PIC/S Annex 2A. Duplicate inspections find the same things; the cost is capacity that could inspect new sites instead.
What would test it
Pilot mutual recognition for ten ATMP and radiopharmaceutical sites between FDA, EMA and MHRA, tracking inspection counts, findings and time-to-supply against matched non-participating sites.
Maturity
early clinical
Who has to act
regulator
Cost to try
Small (under $1M)
Years to first evidence
3
Bottlenecks it attacks

Connected

4top

Pages like this

not linked directly; found by shared links