Introduction: Excipients are, in addition to active substances, an integral part of every medicine. The emergence of new diseases, new technologies, and demand for designing innovative new medicines consequently results in increased demand for excipients. These allow for new delivery routes, enhance compliance with patients, increase the stability of active substances, and even improve safety. Pharmaceutical companies are often reluctant to introduce novel excipients in their formulations, because under current legislation they are not independently assesssed for safety, which means that safe use of a novel excipient has to be validated in a similar way to the safety of a new active substance.
Purpose: The purpose of the master thesis is to review guidelines for risk assessment of novel excipients, analyse the restrictions for the use of novel excipients in new medicines, review examples of novel excipients, and assess the role of the US Food and Drug Administration and the International Pharmaceutical Excipient Council in the process of independent registration of novel excipients.
Methods: In order to review relevant literature we used sources available on the internet. We consulted academic articles and guidelines available on the official websites of regulatory agencies and organisations FDA, IPEC, EMA, and ICH. Additionally, we explored articles from PubMed, ScienceDirect, and Google that were returned from the search by keywords »novel excipients«, »new excipients«, »innovative excipients«, »regulation of novel excipients«, »safety of excipients«, »excipient innovation«, »new vs novel excipient«, »intellectual property of the novel excipient«, »excipient database«, »novel excipients and Covid« and similar combinations.
Results and discussion: Based on the reviewed literature we have come to the following conclusions:
• Guidelines on the safety of novel excipients, available at FDA and at IPEC, are rather similar to each other. The scope of the studies varies depending on the intended use of a novel excipient and on the route of administration. The European Medicines Agency does not provide special guidelines for assessing the safety of novel excipients, but envisages testing of novel excipients within the process of testing the medicinal product, which is expected to be very similar to the testing of novel excipients.
• The main constraints and challenges for the use of novel excipients in new medicines are regulatory provisions, safety assessment, substantial cost and long development times, vague definition of the notion »novel excipient«, absence of a list of novel excipients, and intellectual property rights.
• In the last thirty years only a small number of novel chemical excipients has been introduced. The pandemic of Coronavirus forced researchers to develop new excipients that enabled the production of a safe and effective vaccine.
• FDA and IPEC have been trying to improve the situation and make it easier for the producers to use and register novel excipients. FDA has launched a voluntary novel excipient review pilot programme in 2021 to allow excipient manufacturers to review new excipients before they are used in new medicines and to allow for an independent assessment. The International Pharmaceutical Excipient Council has issued a new safety guide for pharmaceutical excipients, which applies globally and is intended to provide information to help determine the amount of safety data required when using a novel excipient, bearing in mind that the amount and level of safety data required may vary depending on the type of novel excipient.
Conclusion: Despite the existence of a large number of already known excipients, which bring certain advantages in their use, there is a great need for new ones. In order to encourage the development of novel excipients, regulatory authorities will need to amend legislation to allow for the independent safety assessment of novel excipients and to take a less restrictive and less challenging approach to their use. FDA's pilot programme could be a major step forward in this direction in the future.
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