Viral safety in the biopharmaceutical industry is both an upstream-production and downstream-processing concern. Companies must take a multipronged approach using orthogonal methods that are validated to prevent viral contamination or to remove it from biologic drug products. On the upstream side, the focus is on prevention through risk assessment and mitigation. That begins with environmental control of facilities and includes both careful selection of raw materials and cell lines and preparatory filtration of culture media components. In downstream processing of…

As described in ICH Q5A on virus safety of biotechnological products (1) and the European guideline on virus safety of biotechnological products, EMEA 398498 (2), viral clearance studies are mandated as part of the viral safety evaluation of products derived from human or other mammalian cell lines. When acceptable ranges of process parameters are known, both guidelines recommend that scale-down models be evaluated under worst-case conditions for viral clearance. The BioPhorum Development Group’s viral clearance workstream performed a benchmarking survey…