Laboratory Considerations for Clinical Trials

Mike Brown is the Senior Director of Immuno-analytical and the Bioanalytical Site Lead at Q² Solutions. In this episode, he describes the considerations for pharmacokinetic and immunogenicity assays in the development of biologics.

He lays out the types of analysis that are needed along with the associated challenges, such as detecting the concentration of a specific antibody therapeutic present at 100 picograms/ml in an antibody background of up to 20 billion picograms/ml. He suggests that sponsors think about the reagents that will be essential for the assays that need to be performed. An analyst will ask:

"Are you going to help put some tools in our toolbox to be able to see that needle in a haystack?" And what the sponsors need to be able to do is to really have good lines of communication within their company, to make sure during the drug development program, that they actually are beginning to invest in those specific materials.

And having disease state matrix during method development, also, in my opinion, it's critical to ensuring that once we get into that patient population, we reduce the risk those are going to be big surprises for working in that biological matrix that's going to interfere with that assay selectivity. The lead times can be significant as can the price, but it really does mitigate risk.

Dr Brown also recommends engaging the FDA early to reduce any risk to your timelines. No one wants to get to the point of submission to find out that the approach was unacceptable and lose precious time.