Gene Therapy: Development, Design of Studies, and Approval Process

Genome editing can be applied to various areas of medical diagnosis and treatments. Gene therapy pre-market applications comprise of systematically assessing a product’s design controls, manufacturing process controls, and proposed protocols for post-marketing surveillance. Quality risk management principles have been described in various FDA regulatory guidances for several aspects of good manufacturing practices (GMPs) such as several stages of process validation and verification in the genome product’s life cycle including critical quality attributes (CQAs) and monitoring critical process parameters (CPPs). A CPP is defined as a process parameter whose variability has an impact on a CQA of genome product and, therefore, should be monitored or controlled to ensure that the manufacturing process produces an end product of the desired quality. FDA’s mission is to facilitate the premarket review and evaluation of new genomic products for clinical use. The FDA guidances emphasize a quality management approach to the design of studies by providing oversight and objective review based on risk-benefit analysis of new genomic products. FDA reviews, evaluates, verifies and validates the implementation of the regulatory design-control requirements which are applied to the control genomic product’s quality throughout the total product life cycle (TPLC) [1-5].