Perrigo, Pfizer want the US FDA to postpone its March 1 deadline for conducting nitrosamine risk assessments. Generics exec cites“serious compliance challenges” in conducting these assessments due to difficulty in finding the right lab equipment necessary to quantify nitrosamine daily intake limits.

After EU regulators decided that biological medicines should be reviewed for the presence of possible nitrosamine impurities – as is already required for chemical medicines – new deadlines have been agreed on to give companies enough time to comply.

The International Pharmaceutical Regulators Programme has documented various approaches currently being used for the clinical comparability of biosimilar monoclonal antibodies in different jurisdictions.