Pharmaceutical And Medical Device Safety

"This book examines how regulatory and liability mechanisms have impacted upon product safety decisions in the pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors in Europe, the USA and beyond since the 1950s. Thirty-five case studies illustrate the interplay between the regulatory regimes and litigation. Observations from medical practice have been the overwhelming means of identifying post-marketing safety issues. Drug and device safety decisions have increasingly been taken by public regulators and companies within the framework of the comprehensive regulatory structure that has developed since the 1960s. In general, product liability cases have not identified or defined safety issues, and function merely as compensation mechanisms. This is unsurprising as the thresholds for these two systems differ considerably; regulatory action can be triggered by the possibility that a product might be harmful, whereas establishing liability in litigation requires proving that the product was actually harmful. As litigation normally post-dates regulatory implementation, the 'private enforcement' of public law has generally not occurred in these sectors. This has profound implications for the design of sectoral regulatory and liability regimes, including associated features such as extended liability law, class actions and contingency fees. This book forms a major contribution to the academic debate on the comparative utility of regulatory and liability systems, on public versus private enforcement, and on mechanisms of behaviour control."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

While the safety assessment (“biocompatibility”) of medical devices has been focused on issues of local tissue tolerance (irritation, sensitization, cytotoxicity) and selected quantal effects (genotoxicity and acute lethality) since first being regulated in the late 1950s, this has changed as devices assumed a much more important role in healthcare and became more complex in both composition and in their design and operation. Add to this that devices now frequently serve as delivery systems for drugs, and that drugs may be combined with devices to improve device performance, and the problems of ensuring patient safety with devices has become significantly more complex. A part of this, requirements for ensuring safety (once based on use of previously acceptable materials – largely polymers and metals) have come to requiring determining which chemical entities are potentially released from a device into patients (and how much is released). Then an appropriate and relevant (yet also conservative) risk assessment must be performed for each identified chemical structure. The challenges inherent in meeting the current requirements are multifold, and this text seeks to identify, understand, and solve all of them. • Identify and verify the most appropriate available data. • As in most cases such data is for a different route of exposure, transform it for use in assessing exposure by the route of interest. • As the duration (and rate) of exposure to moieties released from a device are most frequently different (longer) than what available data speaks to, transformation across tissue is required. • As innate and adaptive immune responses are a central part of device/patient interaction, assessing potential risks on this basis are required. • Incorporating assessments for special populations such as neonates. • Use of (Q)SAR (Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships) modeling in assessments. • Performance and presentation of integrative assessments covering all potential biologic risks. Appendices will contain summarized available biocompatibility data for commonly used device materials (polymers and metals) and safety assessments on the frequently seen moieties in extractions from devices.

The inspiration for this text was the 1988 volume by Alder and Zbinden, written before the ICH harmonization process for drug safety evaluation (or its ISO analog for device biocompatibility evaluation) had been initiated or come to force. Since then, much has changed in both the world and practice of medicine and the regulation of drugs. The intent of this volume is to provide similar guidance as to what nonclinical safety assessment tests need to be performed to move a drug into man, through development and to market approved (this intent was subsequently extended to cover the closely related medical device biotechnology, and combination product fields) in a concise, abbreviated manner for all the major world market countries.

The very rapid pace of advances in biomedical research promises us a wide range of new drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures. The extent to which these discoveries will benefit the public, however, depends in large part on the methods we choose for developing and testing them. Modern Methods of Clinical Investigation focuses on strategies for clinical evaluation and their role in uncovering the actual benefits and risks of medical innovation. Essays explore differences in our current systems for evaluating drugs, medical devices, and clinical procedures; health insurance databases as a tool for assessing treatment outcomes; the role of the medical profession, the Food and Drug Administration, and industry in stimulating the use of evaluative methods; and more. This book will be of special interest to policymakers, regulators, executives in the medical industry, clinical researchers, and physicians.

Medical Device Safety: The Regulation of Medical Devices for Public Health and Safety examines the prospects for achieving global harmonization in medical device regulation and describes a possible future global system. Unresolved difficulties are discussed while solutions are proposed. An essential book for all those involved in health physics, en

Written in a clear and concise style by an experienced author, this attractively-priced book covers regulatory affairs in all major global markets for pharmaceuticals and medical devices, making it the most comprehensive in its field. Following a look at drug development, complete sections are devoted to national and EU regulatory issues, manufacturing license application and retention, and regulation in the USA. Other topics dealt with include CDER, CBER and marketing and manufacturing licenses, the ICH process and Good Laboratory/Clinical/Manufacturing Practices. Everything pharmacologists, bioengineers, pharma engineers, students in pharmacy and those working in the pharmaceutical industry need to know about medical regulatory affairs.

This handbook covers medical device regulatory systems in different countries, ISO standards for medical devices, clinical trial and regulatory requirements, and documentation for application. It is the first to cover the medical device regulatory affairs in Asia. Experts from influential international regulatory bodies, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, Japan Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency, Saudi Food and Drug Authority, Korea Testing Laboratory, Taiwan FDA, World Health Organization, Asian Harmonization Working Party, Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society, and British Standards Institution, have contributed to the book. Government bodies, the medical device industry, academics, students, and general readers will find the book immensely useful for understanding the global regulatory environment and in their research and development projects.

The term 'medical devices' covers a wide range of equipment essential for patient care at every level of the health service, whether at the bedside, at a health clinic or in a large specialised hospital. Yet many countries lack access to high-quality devices, particularly in developing countries where health technology assessments are rare and there is a lack of regulatory controls to prevent the use of substandard devices. This publication provides a guidance framework for countries wishing to create or modify their own regulatory systems for medical devices, based on best practice experience in other countries. Issues highlighted include: the need for harmonised regulations; and the adoption, where appropriate, of device approvals of advanced regulatory systems to avoid an unnecessary drain on scarce resources. These approaches allow emphasis to be placed on locally-assessed needs, including vendor and device registration, training and surveillance and information exchange systems.