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In 2005, the heads of the European medicines agencies agreed that all EU member states must have the infrastructure and processes
in place to handle only electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) format electronic documents by an agreed second half of
2009 deadline. The rationale behind the move was to successfully support the related decision-making processes for medicinal
products within the EU.1 Now, all companies submitting electronic applications for medicinal product marketing authorization must be eCTDready; this
month sees the mandate issued by the EUropean Medicines Agency (EMA) come into effect.
One of the main reasons behind the EMA's drive for electronic submissions is to encourage paperless submissions; thus reducing
the high cost and inefficiencies associated with paper applications. "A paper submission for marketing authorization of a
medicinal product easily fills 150 binders and more," explained Dr Barbara Jentges, Managing Director at PhACT GmbH, a regulatory
consulting and training firm based in Switzerland.
The EMA has now reinforced its commitment to electronic submissions by mandating the use of the eCTD format for the centralized
procedure of all electroniconly submissions. "From here on in, noneCTD format electronic submissions will be rejected. Although
paperonly submissions may be accepted as an alternative, this type of submission may lead to significant handling and review
issues," Jentges added.
So what does this mean to industry and regulators? Submitting a marketing authorization application electronically should
be simpler and more efficient compared with the effort required to compile a paper submission, which requires copying, packaging,
shipping, archiving and so on.
Theoretically, electronic submissions should be simpler. Some people may find the idea hard to swallow, but they're going
to have to come around to that way of thinking soon — the era of electronic submissions is now upon the pharmaceutical industry
and it will probably eventually lead to the full phasing out of paper submissions for all medicinal product marketing authorizations.
What is eCTD?
To understand how to achieve eCTD compliance, one must first understand the eCTD itself.
"An eCTD is the electronic submission of registration files that are organized according to the version 3.2 of the ICH eCTD
specifications... an eCTD is the submission of (mostly) PDF leaf documents, stored in the eCTD directory structure, crucially
accessed through the XML backbone (index.xml) and with the files integrity guaranteed by the MD5 Checksum."2
Sounds confusing "Ultimately, the idea behind eCTD is to harmonize the standard of electronic-only submissions and provide
an electronic submission documentation that can be easily navigated and archived by both applicant and reviewer," Jentges
summarized. "One of the key challenges for the applicant is the preparation of 'eCTDcompliant documents'."This includes, for
example, the creation of PDF v1.4 files only, as this is currently the only PDF version that is compatible with the regulatory
authority systems. All pages of the document must also be textbased, rather than imagebased, and a number of navigation tools,
such as hyperlinking and bookmarking, must be implemented to make documents searchable. "So if you have scanned documents
of text, then these need to be converted to text-based PDF files using Optical Character Recognition," Jentges clarified.
"Producing an eCTD is going to be far from simple. Of course, this procedure will allow industry and regulators to archive
and access submissions at the click of a button, and that is a big benefit," she added. However, the implementation of eCTD
will require companies to install a suitable information technology infrastructure and to alter the processes they already
have in place to produce marketing authorization applications. Furthermore, once a company has become eCTD compliant and is
ready to submit the appropriate documents for European review, they must then consider the differences across EU member states
as well as across different continents. "For example, US eCTDs require the provision of study tagging files for each preclinical
and clinical study report," advised Jentges.
