In a stunning decision against the FDA, the United States District Court for the Central District of California ruled this week that autologous fat stem cell products cannot be regulated as new drugs. The ruling contains several comments by the court that upend about two decades of FDA’s regulatory decisions and several guidance documents, that … Read more
Medical devices not approved for sale in the US can be exported to other countries provided FDA determines that such exportation is not contrary to the public health and safety, and the device has the approval of the foreign country to which it is being exported. The manufacturers of such devices need to obtain an … Read more
Clinical trial sponsors with limited resources are permitted to charge patients for participating in their trial. However, there are rules and strict limitations for the cost that can be recovered from patients, and FDA’s permission must be obtained prior to charging patients. Sponsors have been allowed to charge the cost of manufacturing the investigational drug … Read more
Conducting clinical trials in children is extremely challenging so very few drugs are tested and approved based on pediatric clinical trials. Pediatricians frequently guesstimate dosing for their patients based on subjective assessment of the dosing data approved for adults. However, there might be an FDA-acceptable statistical methodology for formal extrapolation of adult doses to children … Read more
At $2.8 million per patient, the recently approved gene therapy treatment from Bluebird Bio is one of the most expensive treatments approved by the FDA. While developers may justify the cost of such treatments, is there an appetite with the payors for covering such treatments? Without coverage practically no patient can afford to pay for … Read more
Safety report for serious adverse events (SAE) observed in bioequivalence/bioavailability (BA/BE) studies are submitted as FDA MedWatch Forms (FDA 3500A Form) to the FDA. Going forward, FDA requires that sponsors of BA/BE studies submit SAE reports electronically via the ESG or the Safety Reporting Portal (SRP) only. The purpose of such reporting is to make … Read more
An independent review found many errors about the start and completion timelines for clinical trials reported on the clinicaltrials.gov registry. It also found that NIH and FDA have no mechanism to police the inaccuracies in the reported study timelines. The errors primarily emanate from the lack of standardization of the definition of the start and … Read more
FDA’s practice of remote inspections, necessitated by the pandemic, is being made permanent via a new Guidance Document released this week. Remote inspections are known by many synonymous terms such as Remote Regulatory Assessment (RRA), remote interactive evaluations, remote record review, etc. Although FDA says that the RRAs do not replace on-site in-person inspections, and … Read more
Applicants must respond to a Complete Response Letter (CRL) within 1 year unless an extension is requested prior to the expiration of the 1-year period. So far, FDA liberally granted extensions for the CRL responses, but not for long. In a new guidance document describing a previously unenforced policy, FDA announced that it would limit … Read more
The Instructions For Use (IFU) provide critical information on how to use or administer a drug or biologic product for a patient or caregiver. FDA expects the IFU to be written in a simple non-technical language, in active voice, with size 10 or above font preferably Arial or Verdana, avoiding shading or highlights and many … Read more
