Happy Martin Luther King Day!
Congress set the calendar for many different kinds of requirements when it adopted the Drug Supply Chain Security Act, signed by the President back on November 27, 2013. One of those dates was last November 27, 2015, two years after enactment, when the FDA was required to publish four new draft guidances. So far, none of them have appeared (see “FDA DSCSA Deadline Passes Quietly”). Continue reading Who Is Being Harmed By Four Overdue FDA DSCSA Guidances?
The pharmaceutical supply chain in most markets is complex, but in my view, the one in the European Union easily takes the prize for being the most complex of any other. The addition of unit-level serialization and verification of authenticity to that supply chain over the next few years as required by the Falsified Medicines Directive (FMD) and the Delegated Act (EUDA) is going to be difficult (see “Breaking News: The EC Has Published The Delegated Act“). It represents a huge change to the way drugs are packaged and how they are handled by each entity in the supply chain. It is vital that the transition Continue reading Insufficient Transitional Measures Doom The FMD-EUDA
Regulations often make use of a concept known as “grandfathering” to soften a given deadline so that it is easier for companies to meet. When allowed, grandfathering allows a company to continue doing something after a regulatory deadline that mandates a change, as long as one or more pre-conditions apply. For example, Section 582(a)(5)(B) of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) allows wholesale distributors, and repackagers to sell drugs that were already within the supply chain on January 1, 2015 without passing the necessary transaction data. This makes sense because companies were not obligated to supply that data before that date and so some of the assertions required in the Transaction Statement would not be true (among other problems that grandfathering eliminates). [Of course, Continue reading Will Manufacturers Be Able To Grandfather Products In Their DC And 3PL?
According to the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), manufacturers must apply a new “Product Identifier” on all of their prescription drug products by November 27, 2017 (Repackagers by that date in 2018). The DSCSA Product Identifier is defined this way:
“PRODUCT IDENTIFIER.—
The term ‘product identifier’ means a standardized graphic that includes, in both human-readable form and on a machine-readable data carrier that conforms to the standards developed by a widely recognized international standards development organization, the standardized numerical identifier, lot number, and expiration date of the product.” (Section 581[14])
Continue reading The DSCSA Product Identifier On Drug Packages
Last week I discussed controversy over the use of GS1’s Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) in the Brazil pharma supply chain to meet regulatory requirements imposed by ANVISA. But there are different controversies, or at least potential confusion, in the U.S. pharma supply chain surrounding case labels, and some of those are relate to the SSCC and its use.
A case product identification label is the label a manufacturer usually places on each homogeneous case at case-packing time to identify what is inside the corrugated box. A “homogenous case” is a case that Continue reading Identification Of Pharma Cases In The U.S.
I often write about the fact that drug manufacturers and repackagers that sell into the U.S. market must put “serial numbers”, or “serialize” their drug packages and homogeneous cases before November 27, 2017, but what exactly does that mean?
Let’s break it down. The Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) defines the term “Product identifier” this way:
“PRODUCT IDENTIFIER.—
The term ‘product identifier’ means a standardized graphic that includes, in both human-readable form and on a machine-readable data carrier that conforms to the standards developed by a widely recognized international standards development organization, the standardized numerical identifier, lot number, and expiration date of the product.” (Section 581[14])
Back in March of 2010—3 ½ years before Congress passed the DSCSA—the FDA published final guidance called “Guidance for Industry, Standards for Securing the Drug Supply Chain – Standardized Numerical Identification for Prescription Drug Packages”, which defined the term “standardized numerical identifier (SNI)” this way: Continue reading DSCSA “Serial Numbers”
The U.S. pharma supply chain will operate under two major phases as dictated by the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). We are now operating under the first major phase. Well, OK, it won’t be fully operational until July 1st when dispensers (see “Who Is A DSCSA Dispenser?”) are required to begin receiving, saving and retrieving Transaction Information (TI), Transaction History (TH), and Transaction Statements (TS) for each shipment they receive. Drug manufacturers, repackagers and wholesale distributors were supposed to begin exchanging those documents on January 1st but in late December the FDA issued a draft guidance that indicated they will not enforce that requirement until May 1st (see “FDA Postpones Enforcement of DSCSA Transaction Data Exchange Until May 1”). But be aware that according to the DSCSA, as of January 1st, all trading partners must be properly licensed and everyone may only buy and sell drugs legally from/to companies who hold a valid State or Federal license. Those and other requirements of the DSCSA were not delayed by the FDA.
The second major phase of the DSCSA will not occur until November 27, 2023 when the law transforms into something that is fairly nebulous right now. That is, between now and Continue reading The Coming Battle Over Decommissioning At The Pharmacy
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