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News:Union Minister for Science & Technology has released the Guidelines for Evaluation of Nanopharmaceuticals in India.
Facts:
What are Nanopharmaceuticals?
- Nanopharmaceuticals represent an emerging field where the sizes of the drug particle or a therapeutic delivery system work at the nanoscale.
- In the pharmaceutical industry, a long standing issue is the difficulty of delivering the appropriate dose of a particular active agent to specific disease site.
- Nanopharmaceuticals have enormous potential in addressing this failure of traditional therapeutics which offers site-specific targeting of active agents.
- Such precision targeting via nanopharmaceuticals reduces higher efficacy, lower toxicity and are safer than the conventional drugs.
Guidelines on Nanopharmaceuticals:
- These Guidelines were prepared to provide transparent, consistent and predictable regulatory pathways for nanopharmaceuticals in India.
- They were framed by the inter-ministerial expert committee constituted by the Department of Biotechnology in May 2019.
- It was prepared in line with the provisions of Schedule Y of Drugs and Cosmetics Rules,1945 as well as Second Schedule of the New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules, 2019 with specific requirements for nanopharmaceuticals.
Key points of the Guidelines:
- The impact of nano material waste disposal on environment should be declared.
- The stability testing for Nanoformulations should focus on functionality, integrity, size range of nanopharmaceuticals.
- It makes it compulsory for the pharma companies to present the data on how the plasma, off-target tissue and disease sites are affected by repeated dosing.
- It provides guidelines for animal toxicology data.It allows the toxicology studies to be performed only on rodent species and dogs in both sexes.
Significance of the guidelines:
- The guidelines will help to facilitate research in line with the regulatory requirements.
- It will help in making decision in clearing new products based on nanotechnology and would also help in attracting new private investments.
- It will help to initiate activities for developing safety guidelines for other domains like agri-inputs, cosmetics, implantable devices.
