I understand why “process intensification” is a buzzword embraced by the vendor and consulting communities. Now I want to know what the term means to biopharma companies, and whether—and how—you’re implementing it.

When it comes to current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) compliance, many sponsors lose sight of their responsibility to ensure that each gram or dose of externally derived output fully meets its registered parameters and has been demonstrated by the contract manufacturing organization as manufactured in full compliance with the requirements of cGMP.

It seems pitiful that, for whatever reason, industry has failed to universally adopt more effective technologies to control contamination resulting in safer sterile drugs. On the other hand, the regulators must share substantial blame because of their historically lukewarm acceptance of emerging and even established advanced technologies.

All partners in the vaccine supply chain recognize that the supply chain challenges posed by COVID-19 must be assessed and mitigated. Increased monitoring and corrective and preventive actions of supply chain issues and technical support for analytical challenges need to be addressed.

Infusing risk management is essential to an organization, especially in terms of facility, utility, and equipment qualification. Although qualification is usually the last step before moving to process characterization and validation, integrating a risk management approach is an effective way to ensure qualification activities are focusing on what matters most — that equipment performs as expected.

Human performance improvement requires special focus and deliberate action by management to move from an old construct of investigating error as a human failure to an new construct where error is a symptom of a problem to be understood, linked to the context in which the error took place, and it is the starting point of the investigation, not its conclusion.

Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry does not understand how to control a risk’s likelihood of occurrence. The current draft of EU GMP Annex 1 is an example of the industry’s focus on a risk’s severity while not understanding or evaluating a risk’s uncertainty and thus defaulting to using the precautionary principle for guidance.

In their race to leverage sophisticated computing technologies (particularly artificial intelligence, robotics, augmented/virtual reality, and IoT), life science companies face a hidden, insidious challenge — avoiding the cognitive biases that can cause them to unwittingly exacerbate already business-threatening cyber risks.

This is Part 1 of a two-part roundtable Q&A focused on human performance in pharmaceutical operations. In this part, we discuss key drivers for human performance improvement, compare lean manufacturing and human performance programs, and provide perspectives on human performance in the context of the rapid scale-up and production of COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines.