PIC/S- Good manufacturing Practices Part-II

 1.1 Objective

This document (Guide) is intended to provide guidance regarding good manufacturing practice (GMP) for the manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) under an appropriate system for managing quality. It is also intended to help ensure that APIs meet the requirements for quality and purity that they purport or are represented to possess.

In this Guide “manufacturing” includes all operations of receipt of materials, production, packaging, repackaging, labelling, relabelling, quality control, release, storage and distribution of APIs and the related controls. In this Guide the term “should” indicates recommendations that are expected to apply unless shown to be inapplicable, modified in any relevant annexes to the GMP Guide, or replaced by an alternative demonstrated to provide at least an equivalent level of quality assurance.

The GMP Guide as a whole does not cover safety aspects for the personnel engaged in the manufacture, nor aspects of protection of the environment. These controls are inherent responsibilities of the manufacturer and are governed by national laws.

This Guide is not intended to define registration requirements or modify pharmacopoeial requirements and does not affect the ability of the responsible competent authority to establish specific registration requirements regarding APIs within the context of marketing/manufacturing authorisations. All commitments in registration documents must be met.

1.2 Scope

This Guide applies to the manufacture of APIs for medicinal products for both human and veterinary use. It applies to the manufacture of sterile APIs only up to the point immediately prior to the APIs being rendered sterile. The sterilisation and aseptic processing of sterile APIs are not covered, but should be performed in accordance with the principles and guidelines of GMP as laid down in national legislations and interpreted in the GMP Guide including its Annex 1.

In the case of ectoparasiticides for veterinary use, other standards than this Guide, that ensure that the material is of appropriate quality, may be used.

This Guide excludes whole blood and plasma as the PIC/S GMP Guide for Blood Establishments lays down the detailed requirements for the collection and testing of blood. However, it does include APIs that are produced using blood or plasma as raw materials. Finally, the Guide does not apply to bulk-packaged medicinal products. It applies to all other active starting materials subject to any derogations described in the annexes to the GMP Guide, in particular Annexes 2 to 7 where supplementary guidance for certain types of API may be found. The annexes will consequently undergo a review but in the meantime and only until this review is complete, manufacturers may choose to continue to use Part I of the basic requirements and the relevant annexes for products covered by those annexes, or may already apply Part II.

Section 19 contains guidance that only applies to the manufacture of APIs used in the production of investigational medicinal products although it should be noted that its application in this case, although recommended, is not required in PIC/S countries.

An “API Starting Material” is a raw material, intermediate, or an API that is used in the production of an API and that is incorporated as a significant structural fragment into the structure of the API. An API Starting Material can be an article of commerce, a material purchased from one or more suppliers under contract or commercial agreement, or produced in-house. API Starting Materials normally have defined chemical properties and structure.

The manufacturer should designate and document the rationale for the point at which production of the API begins. For synthetic processes, this is known as the point at which "API Starting Materials" are entered into the process. For other processes (e.g. fermentation, extraction, purification, etc), this rationale should be established on a case-by-case basis. Table 1 gives guidance on the point at which the API Starting Material is normally introduced into the process.

From this point on, appropriate GMP as defined in this Guide should be applied to these intermediate and/or API manufacturing steps. This would include the validation of critical process steps determined to impact the quality of the API. However, it should be noted that the fact that a manufacturer chooses to validate a process step does not necessarily define that step as critical.

The guidance in this document would normally be applied to the steps shown in gray in Table 1. It does not imply that all steps shown should be completed. The stringency of GMP in API manufacturing should increase as the process proceeds from early API steps to final steps, purification, and packaging. Physical processing of APIs, such as granulation, coating or physical manipulation of particle size (e.g. milling, micronizing), should be conducted at least to the standards of this Guide.

This GMP Guide does not apply to steps prior to the introduction of the defined "API Starting Material".