What is the Role of the Quality Overall Summary (QOS) in BLA and NDA applications?
Author: Suzanne Broussard, PhD
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is promoting the Quality Overall Summary (QOS) as a powerful tool to promote effective communication between regulators and sponsors of drugs as well as a tool that can substantially impact the efficiency and quality of the regulator’s assessment. The QOS is required for all New Drug Applications (NDAs), Abbreviated New Drug Applications (ANDAs) and Biologics License Applications (BLAs), thus the QOS has significant potential to impact the regulatory review process for getting marketing approval.
The QOS summarizes all quality-related information in the application. As part of Module 2 of the electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD), the QOS links to the sponsor’s larger body of data in Module 3. The QOS is expected to provide the regulator with sufficient information to understand the contents of Module 3 in a high-level overview. However, FDA suggests that many sponsors are falling short of these expectations and are not fully utilizing this powerful tool as an effective guide for regulators to assess the application.
The QOS provides the sponsor with an opportunity to summarize the key aspects of the new drug or biologics application, explain specific items for the regulators to consider, and extend to post-approval comments. Yet, a poorly written QOS requires regulators to spend significant effort to “understand, summarize, collate, and interpret quality data from module 3 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. There can be a disconnect between applicants and regulators regarding the communication of quality data and its impact on the assessment. Currently, it takes time and/or communications (e.g., information requests) to fully understand the quality of data and its significance in an application.
The FDA’s white paper describes key considerations for creating a high–quality QOS to ensure regulators have a good idea of the potential risk to the patient and the control of this risk in the commercially manufactured product. The 3 key considerations are:
Identifying the main risks to the patient from a product quality perspective.
Understanding how the proposed overall control strategy controls and/or mitigates the identified failure modes of the manufacturing process or products.
Acknowledging potential considerations for the quality assessment of the submission.
These key considerations are designed to help regulators evaluate the potential risks related to quality, and their potential impact on the patients, in a summarized benefit and risk assessment. Indeed, the FDA is encouraging sponsors to explain important aspects of the new drug or biologic such as how the product was formulated, and how the risk might impact the patients. Further clarifications on the 3 key considerations are provided in the FDA’s white paper.
Writing these technical documents to concisely convey information is challenging and you might want to consider these project management and quality control tips when putting you QOS together. These tips might just help improve your QOS, which will reduce the number of information requests from the FDA and thus decrease your NDA / BLA review time.
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