Ensuring ICH compliance for pharmaceutical manufacturing
Author : Stephan Nobis, COPA-DATA
09 June 2025
The pharmaceutical industry operates within a complex and highly regulated environment, where ensuring the quality, safety, and efficacy of medicines is paramount. Here, Stephan Nobis, Business Development Manager at COPA-DATA, explains how software solutions can ensure that pharmaceutical manufacturers adhere to International Council for Harmonisation (ICH) guidelines.
The International Council for Harmonisation (ICH) develops guidelines that standardise key processes related to drug development and manufacturing across different regions through a process of scientific consensus with regulatory and industry experts.
The ICH guidelines are grouped into four main categories: Quality (Q-series), Safety (S-series), Efficacy (E-series), and Multidisciplinary (M-series). The guidelines in the Q-series ensure the quality of medicines at all stages of development, from initial design through to manufacturing. Key elements of this series include Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), risk management, and continuous improvement. The Safety (S-series) guidelines focus on minimising risks to patient health, particularly during preclinical development. They cover areas such as carcinogenicity, genotoxicity, and reprotoxicity.
Efficacy (E-series) guidelines make sure that clinical trials and therapeutic evaluations are robust and provide reliable data on the benefits of new medicines. Finally, Multidisciplinary Guidelines (M-series) cover cross-functional areas such as electronic submissions (eCTD) and the use of medical terminology (MedDRA) for regulatory documentation.
Supporting quality assurance with zenon
Adhering to all facets of these guidelines is crucial to ensure that safe, effective, and high-quality medicines are developed and registered in a resource-efficient way. Advanced software platforms can offer a support for pharmaceutical companies to do so. zenon, from automation expert COPA-DATA, provides manufacturers with tools to meet complex regulatory demands within the industry while optimising production processes by automating workflows, ensuring data integrity, and supporting quality management.
In line with Q-series guidelines, zenon can provide valuable assistance to companies seeking, in particular, to comply with ICH guidelines.
ICH Q7: Adhering to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for APIs
For example, ICH Q7 is focused on Good Manufacturing Practices for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), ensuring that they meet stringent quality and purity requirements. zenon helps companies to adhere to these GMP guidelines, by visualising and managing operational process data in real time. This real-time monitoring allows for immediate detection of GMP deviations, triggering alerts to the appropriate quality assurance (QA) personnel for quick intervention. Through zenon’s comprehensive electronic batch records, pharmaceutical companies can minimise batch release times, ensuring that products meet regulatory standards without delay.
Key features like user management, eSignature, audit trails, and deviation detection help to implement GMP-compliant projects seamlessly. These tools ensure that regulatory mistakes are minimised, and product quality is maintained consistently. Moreover, zenon’s connectivity to more than 300 hardware protocols integrates with existing manufacturing systems, ensuring compliance across different regions.
ICH Q8: Supporting Quality by Design (QbD)
ICH Q8 focuses on the implementation of Quality by Design (QbD), a systematic approach that emphasises product and process understanding to ensure consistent quality. zenon facilitates QbD, by enabling pharmaceutical companies to collect and analyse vast amounts of process data and to manage risk effectively throughout the production lifecycle.
With zenon’s historian, real-time data collection, and analysis tools, companies can make data-driven decisions that optimise process parameters, ensuring that products are manufactured within defined quality parameters. By continuously monitoring key process variables and utilising zenon’s recipe management tools, manufacturers can easily adjust and refine processes to maintain product quality.
In today’s pharmaceutical industry, ensuring compliance with international guidelines like those from the ICH is critical. The zenon software platform from COPA-DATA offers tools to support pharmaceutical companies in meeting the ICH guidelines, and can assist in the areas of GMP compliance, QbD, and lifecycle management.
By integrating automation, real-time data collection, and process optimisation into their operations, pharmaceutical companies can not only ensure compliance but also enhance productivity and product quality. zenon offers a solution to support pharmaceutical companies striving for compliance in a highly regulated and competitive market, preserving both data integrity and the quality of medicines for global patients.
Find out more about COPA-DATA here.
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