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Electronic submissions
22 March 2021
From 1 November 2021, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) will begin a staged transition to Electronic Common Technical Document-only (eCTD-only) for all prescription medicines.
Electronic Submissions (or eSubmissions) electronic Submissions (or eSubmissions) are the electronic presentation of information submitted to the TGA, or other regulators, in a standardised paper-less structure.
Electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) and Non eCTD electronic Submission (NeeS) are the standard electronic formats. Other structures or formats may also be accepted.
Australian eCTD submissions
The electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) is a specification for the pharmaceutical industry to submit electronic applications to enter registered medicines into the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG) and is organised according to current Australian and ICH eCTD specifications.
- AU eCTD specification: Module 1 and regional information v3.0 - acceptable until 30 June 2018
- eCTD AU module 1 and regional information V3.1 - effective from 1 January 2018
The current ICH eCTD specification is ICH eCTD Specification V3.2.2.
The eCTD is the submission of (mostly) PDF leaf documents, stored in the eCTD directory structure, accessed through the XML backbone (index.xml) and with the files integrity guaranteed by the MD5 Checksum.
Useful links
- Submitting data in the eCTD format
- Electronic submissions and data review
- Australian eCTD submissions: Frequently asked questions
- ICH electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD)
- ICH Specification v3.2.2 (Module 2-5)
- ICH eCTD Specification and Related Files (Look for the Change Control Process (Microsoft Word document) in the Change Control paragraph)
Non eCTD electronic Submission (NeeS)
The NeeS format should be considered as a transition stage towards the eCTD format.
A NeeS differs from an eCTD in that it does not contain an XML backbone or the quantity of MD5 checksum values as defined by the ICH - it is in essence, a collection of electronic files organised in folders.
However the NeeS module 1 version 2.0 does introduce an Excel form that is to be used to create an XML envelope. Also a NeeS version of the XML Sequence matrix with associated MD5 checksum value.
- AU NeeS specification: Module 1 and regional information - acceptable until 30 June 2018
- AU NeeS specification: Module 1 and regional information, V2.0 - effective from 1 January 2018
- Submitting data in the NeeS format