Walid El Azab

Senior Manager Technical Service at STERIS

Walid El Azab is an Industrial pharmacist and a Qualified Person (QP). He is a Senior Manager Technical Services for the Life Sciences Division of STERIS Corporation.

He currently provides technical support related to cleaning, disinfectants, sterility assurance and process validation. He also leads workshops to improve inspection readiness and contamination control levels. His areas of expertise include both upstream and downstream pharmaceutical operation and validation in non-sterile and sterile process.

Walid has held various positions including Project Manager, Inspection Readiness Manager, Quality and Regulatory Manager, lead auditor, and QP. Walid’s responsibilities and experience have also included project management, handling deviations and complaints, releasing raw materials, drug products and investigational medicinal product (IMP), conducting external audits of suppliers, and leading customer and regulatory (FDA, EMA, SFDA, ANVISA…) audits and develop strategy approach for process, cleaning, and system gap analysis Walid earned a Master’s degree in Industrial Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of Liège, Belgium and is a certified Lean Six Sigma green belt. Walid is a lecturer at the University of Liège (Medicine faculty in Belgium).

He is an active member of the PDA, ISPE, ECA, and A3P associations with numerous published articles and book chapters on contamination control. He is also active with the A3P GIC working groups on sterilization and derouging and passivation, and he leads the UPIP-VAPI EU GMP Annex 1 (guidance for sterile manufacturing) working group, and he is also part of the ECA task force regarding the revision of the EU GMP Annex 1. Also, he will be leading the future ECA task force on contamination control strategy. He is a planning committee member of the Annual

Walid_El_Azab_Steris_BioTech_Pharma_Summit_2021_Profile_3

Title: Contamination Control Strategy, an Implementation approach.