State of Play and Review of Major Cooperation Initiatives

The basic principle of international cooperation is to establish bilateral and multilateral efforts to leverage the human, scientific and financial resources and the knowledge and experience of other key regulatory authorities to avoid duplication of efforts, to make activities more efficient and to allow the focussing of limited resources on higher-risk areas of concern. This increased cooperation between worldwide regulators has necessitated proactive deliberate efforts towards convergence/harmonisation of regulation, practices and requirements to eliminate or reduce differences. Cooperation and harmonisation of standards in the pharmaceutical domain are already a reality and have become increasingly important during recent decades, with a high level of commitment to these activities by all stakeholders. The worldwide Drug Regulatory Authorities (DRAs) have been working to end an isolationist attitude that cannot resolve current worldwide issues and challenges caused by an ever increasing globalisation. As a result, many cooperation and harmonisation initiatives have been established at the bilateral, regional and global levels as a response to the changing geo-economic-political situation. The spectrum of collaboration varies from simple informal technical cooperation to full integration of systems and regulations. Indeed, all these initiatives can be very different in scope (some are part of a broader harmonisation initiative), level of harmonisation (depending on the political support/commitment), organisation (well-structured versus simple discussion) or advancement (established process vs. pilot projects), but they all work towards convergence of requirements and/or practices. All these multiple worldwide cooperation and harmonisation programmes have evolved rapidly over the past decades. This book section provides the current status of this complex and broad phenomenon of cooperation, convergence and harmonisation in the pharmaceutical sector. It reviews all major global, regional and bilateral cooperation initiatives.