The manufacturing of our products, including our precision medicine product candidates, is highly exacting and complex, and we depend on third parties to supply materials and manufacture all our products and product candidates.
Manufacturing is highly exacting and complex due, in part, to strict regulatory requirements governing the manufacture of our current and future products and product candidates, including medical devices, diagnostic products, and pharmaceutical products. We have limited personnel with experience in, and we do not own facilities for, manufacturing any products. We depend upon our collaborators and other third parties, including sole source suppliers, to provide raw materials meeting FDA quality standards and related regulatory requirements, manufacture devices, diagnostic products, and drug substances, produce drug products and provide certain analytical services with respect to our products and product candidates. The FDA and other regulatory authorities require that many of our products be manufactured according to cGMP regulations and that proper procedures be implemented to assure the quality of our sourcing of raw materials and the manufacture of our products. Any failure by us, our collaborators, or our third-party manufacturers to comply with cGMP and/orscale-up manufacturing processes could lead to a delay in, or failure to obtain, marketing authorizations. In addition, such failure could be the basis for action by the FDA, including issuing a warning letter, initiating a product recall or seizure, fines, imposing operating restrictions, total or partial suspension of production or injunctions and/or withdrawing marketing authorizations for products previously granted to us. To the extent we rely on a third-party manufacturer, the risk of noncompliance with cGMPs may be greater and the ability to effect corrective actions for any such noncompliance may be compromised or delayed.
Moreover, we expect that certain of our precision medicine product candidates, includingPGN-600,PGN-001,PGN-300, and PGN-OB2, are drug/device combination products that will be regulated under the drug and biological product regulations of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, or the FD&C Act, and Public Health Service Act, or PHSA, based on their primary modes of action as drugs and biologics. Third-party manufacturers may not be able to comply with cGMP regulations, applicable to drug/device combination products, including applicable provisions of the FDA’s drug and biologics cGMP regulations, device cGMP requirements embodied in the Quality System Regulation, or QSR, or similar regulatory requirements outside the United States.
In addition, we or third parties may experience other problems with the manufacturing, quality control, storage or distribution of our products, including equipment breakdown or malfunction, failure to follow specific protocols and procedures, problems with suppliers and the sourcing or delivery of raw materials and other necessary components, problems with software, labor difficulties, and natural disaster-related events or other environmental factors. These problems can lead to increased costs, lost sales, damage to customer relations, failure to supply penalties, time and expense spent investigating the cause and, depending on the cause, similar losses with respect to other batches of products. If problems are not discovered before the product is released to the market, recalls, corrective actions, or product liability-related costs also may be incurred. Problems with respect to the manufacture, storage, or distribution of products could materially disrupt our business and have a material and adverse effect on our operating results and financial condition.
For additional information regarding our third-party suppliers and manufacturers, see “Business—Laboratories—Laboratory Supplies.”
We rely on third parties to design our product candidates and conduct our preclinical research and clinical trials, and those third parties may not perform satisfactorily, including failing to meet deadlines for the completion of such trials.
We rely and expect to continue to rely on third parties, such as engineering firms, CROs, clinical data management organizations, medical institutions, and clinical investigators, to conduct and manage our molecular testing and therapeutic product candidate design, preclinical testing, and clinical trials. Our
35