A Playbook for FDA Inspections and Remediation with Jeff Hines

What It Covers

Jeff Hines, VP of Quality at Karuna Medical with 37 years of pharmaceutical industry experience including 30 years at Eli Lilly, outlines leadership strategies for navigating FDA inspections across PAI, routine, and for-cause scenarios, covering inspection infrastructure, remediation execution, employee morale, and building lasting compliance culture.

Key Questions Answered

• •Inspection Room Infrastructure: Structure inspections across four dedicated rooms: a front room with quality and technical leads, a backroom staffed with IT-fluent document retrievers connected via Teams or Zoom chat for parallel request processing, a document review room with department SMEs, and a preparation room where experienced staff role-play inspector conversations with employees before they enter.
• •Leadership Demeanor as Risk Control: A leader's visible calm directly regulates team anxiety during inspections. Operators and analysts know their jobs better than anyone, so leaders should frame inspections as an opportunity to demonstrate competence, not a threat. Equally, coach employees to answer only what is asked — volunteering excess information creates unintended threads for inspectors to pull.
• •Remediation Prioritization Framework: When managing a large observation backlog alongside ongoing manufacturing, sequence work by regulatory urgency: stability samples first, prefill or in-process tests second, and discretionary studies last. Communicate trade-offs explicitly to internal customers. Use color-coded project tracking to build team momentum by closing easier observations before tackling complex, multi-department findings.
• •Data Integrity Gap Mapping: When addressing data integrity observations, create step-by-step data flow maps tracing every action from test initiation to final result, identifying each point where an analyst interfaces with the IT system. This process, applied at both laboratory and manufacturing levels, surfaces unknown vulnerabilities — such as audit trail manipulation capabilities — that standard SOP validation procedures routinely miss.
• •Compliance Culture Maintenance: Prevent repeat findings by institutionalizing annual GMP update training that reviews observations from both internal sites and external companies, tracks regulatory shifts, and updates procedures accordingly. Treat quality as a value center rather than a cost center. Invest in conference attendance and regulatory publications, and build bench depth so inspection readiness does not depend on a single experienced individual.