Nonclinical safety testing of biopharmaceuticals can present significant challenges to human risk assessment with these innovative and often complex drugs. Emerging topics in this field were discussed recently at the 2016 Annual US BioSafe General Membership meeting. The presentations and subsequent discussions from the main sessions are summarized. The topics covered included: (i) specialty biologics (oncolytic virus, gene therapy, and gene editing-based technologies), (ii) the value of non-human primates (NHPs) for safety assessment, (iii) challenges in the safety assessment of immuno-oncology drugs (T cell-dependent bispecifics, checkpoint inhibitors, and costimulatory agonists), (iv) emerging therapeutic approaches and modalities focused on microbiome, oligonucleotide, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) therapeutics, (v) first in human (FIH) dose selection and the minimum anticipated biological effect level (MABEL), (vi) an update on current regulatory guidelines, International Council for Harmonization (ICH) S1, S3a, S5, S9 and S11 and (vii) breakout sessions that focused on bioanalytical and PK/PD challenges with bispecific antibodies, cytokine release in nonclinical studies, determining adversity and NOAEL for biologics, the value of second species for toxicology assessment and what to do if there is no relevant toxicology species.
Keywords: Adversity; Biopharmaceuticals; Bispecifics; Cytokine release; Emerging therapies; Gene and cell therapies; Gene editing; Immune-oncology; Immunomodulation; Microbiome; Minimum anticipated biological effect level (MABEL); Monoclonal antibodies; No observed adverse effect level (NOAEL); Nonclinical safety; Nonclinical species selection; Oligonucleotide; Orphan drug; Pharmacodynamics (PD); Pharmacokinetics (PK); Recombinant proteins.
Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Inc.