Good practice in plasma collection and fractionation

Abstract

The control strategy to ensure safety of blood products includes a combination of measures focusing on ensuring the quality and safety of starting material by careful donor selection and testing strategies at different levels, together with validated manufacturing processes, including steps to inactivate or remove potential contaminating agents. Using an approach based on good manufacturing practice (GMP) provides a manufacturing model that allows for a documented system of incorporating quality throughout the entire manufacturing process and describes the activities and controls needed to consistently produce products that comply with specifications and are safe for use. There are no doubts that the aim of providing safe and high‐quality product to the patients should be the same for all products derived from human blood, independent of its use either as a blood component for direct transfusion or as industrially manufactured product. It would be difficult to justify whether for blood components the good practice standards and for plasma derivatives the GMP standards for manufacturing would not ensure equivalent levels of quality and safety. To ensure a high level of quality and safety of blood components and plasma derivatives, the implementation of double standards in blood establishments and fractionation industry would not be effective and should be avoided. Harmonized standards and good practices for collection and fractionation, based on the principles of GMP, should be envisaged in the whole chain of manufacturing blood components and plasma derivatives. Global initiatives to further promote the implementation of harmonized GMP for the collection in blood establishments and a stringent regulatory control are ongoing. This would further contribute to the global availability of plasma‐derived medicinal products.