Chilean pharmaceutical industry warns of risks in imported medicine quality

The National Chamber of Pharmaceutical Laboratories has expressed concern regarding the mechanism used by the Chilean state, through CENABAST, to import medicines from production plants that have not been verified under the quality and safety standards required by Chilean law.

Claudia Papic, Executive Vice President of the Chamber, noted that many of these imported medicines have been withdrawn from the market due to quality failures that threaten public health. While the Public Health Institute (ISP) regularly inspects domestic production plants, it currently lacks the capacity to perform similar field inspections for most foreign plants.

The industry proposes several solutions to address this regulatory imbalance, including allocating more resources to the ISP to expand its inspection capacity, requiring the ISP to conduct prior visits to the origin plants of all state-imported medicines, and establishing a joint working group between CENABAST, the Ministry of Health, the ISP, and the local industry.