FDA inspects Hovione’s Technology Transfer Center in New Jersey

Loures, Portugal, October 29, 2007 - Hovione's Technology Transfer Center (TTC) in New Jersey has just passed successfully a pre-approval inspection by FDA.

The inspection was carried out by Ms. Joy R. Kozlowski-Klena Compliance Officer at the US FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) and lasted 3 days, starting on October 9th and concluded on the 12th. No form 483 was issued. At the closing meeting, the inspector had several positive comments on our systems and indicated she would be recommending the approval of the site. This inspection covered the TTC's first commercial product - a high potency small molecule API for an injectable formulation. The NDA was filed last May and approval is expected in Q1 2008, with a launch foreseen later that year. Mr. Dave Hoffman, President of the US Operations said “This is an exciting milestone for our New Jersey Technology Transfer Center. This successful FDA compliance inspection gives a green light to an NDA compound - we look forward to further expanding small scale commercial manufacturing opportunities at our NJ site”.

Hovione plants have been object of 15 FDA inspections. This inspection is the first at the New Jersey since it started to operate as an R&D facility in September 2002. In the Establishment Inspection Report issued by Ms. Joy R. Kozlowski-Klena it is stated “This inspection covered the NDA under evaluation, as well as limited GMP coverage of systems in place at this time, including Quality, Laboratory, Production, Facilities and Equipment. The inspection did not reveal any significant deficiencies.”

The TTC site consist of process chemistry R&D labs, cGMP kilo and scale-up labs and a cGMP pilot plant. The TTC is also the home of Hovione’s commercial offices. The TTC offers Hovione´s US based customers’ process development and scale-up services, along with quality control/assurance and regulatory support. The cGMP facility is designed to prepare small quantity NCE’s to support customer's pre-clinical and early-phase clinical development, demonstrating the customer’s processes locally before transferring them to Hovione's full scale manufacturing plants, in Europe and Asia.

About Hovione
Hovione is an international group specializing in the development and compliant production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), serving exclusively the pharmaceutical industry. With a 48-year track record in process development, quality standard and advanced particle design technologies, Hovione offers APIs for all drug delivery systems, from oral to injectable and from inhalation to topical applications. With FDA inspected plants in Europe, Far East and New Jersey, Hovione is committed to the highest levels of service and quality. Specializing in complex chemistry, Hovione offers services related to the development and manufacture of either a new chemical entity (NCE) for an exclusive contract manufacturing partner or an existing API for an off-patent product.

Continuous Tableting (CT) is defined as continuous manufacturing of oral dose drugs, specifically tablets. As per ICH's Q13 definition1, a continuous manufacturing process in the pharmaceutical industry comprises at least two unit operations integrated from a mechanical and software perspective. There is a wide combination of possible CT process configurations that are dependent on the needs of the intended product formulation and each of the individual unit operations that constitute the process train can be continuous, semi-continuous, or batch processes. The typical manufacturing processes for tablet formulation are direct compression (DC), dry granulation (DG) and wet granulation (WG)2 - details on these manufacturing processes are beyond the scope of this article, so the interested reader is directed to relevant literature. The actual implementation of CT technology in a facility can broadly vary depending on the level of desired integration and automation. Process trains can be designed to be flexible and converted between multiple configurations (e.g. continuous DC, DG and WG), controlled by the end user from one single software and within a single clean room. The other possibility would be for subsections of the CT process to be divided into multiple clean rooms where inprocess materials are transferred between suites via a bin-to-bin approach (e.g. a granulation suite to prepare granules from raw materials followed by continuous DC (CDC) to blend the granules and produce tablets). The level of automation and instrumentation designed into the CT process (typically involving Process Analytical Technologies, PAT) can open the possibility to implement sophisticated control strategies. Key components of a control strategy that need to be considered for CT are material tracking and genealogy, knowledge of the residence time distribution (RTD), and in-process controls (spectroscopic and/or soft sensors based on process parameters). Holistically, these control strategy elements enable the implementation of a material diversion strategy to automatically divert out of specification material from the process. In their most advanced form, control strategies may also enable real time release testing (RTRt) of the final tablet drug product and reduce the off-line analytical burden and the number of operators needed to manage the process. Read the full article at gmp-journal.com

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