The high cost of healthcare in the US is often blamed on the high cost of prescription drugs, however, a recent study showed that the administrative costs play a much bigger role in our increased medical bills. The US healthcare costs is often compared to that in Canada, with laws being created to reimport drugs … Read more
For the last few years FDA has been approving more than 40 new drugs each year, a trend that continued in 2019 with the approval of 48 new drugs and biologics. But it is important to look beyond the numbers to fully understand the trend behind these. First let’s look at the numbers. This year’s … Read more
About 1200 currently ongoing clinical trials in the US are using digitally connected tools such as wearable devices and mobile apps. That’s a 6-fold increase from about 200 such trials in 2009. However, with about 22,000 studies ongoing in the US, this is a small fraction of all clinical trials. There are several obvious benefits … Read more
The GAO reports this week that FDA is severely short of inspectors capable of auditing foreign sites, it gives up to 12 weeks’ notice to foreign sites prior to inspections giving them ample opportunity to clean-up and cover deficiencies, and its inspectors for foreign sites are given inadequate time to complete their job making them … Read more
A perspective in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) presents the unique challenge faced by medical professionals regarding use of CBD products by their patients. CBD products tread a fine line between legal and illegal products. Without any specific disease claims, CBD containing products can be sold as cosmetics or supplements. On the other … Read more
Last week FDA released the final guidance document for adaptive trials for drugs and biologics and it contains mostly the same information as the previous guidance documents by the Agency on the topic with some small but critical recommendations. FDA expects the sponsors to include the statistical analysis plan, the Data Monitoring Committee (DMC) charter, … Read more
Two new drug approvals for rare and life-threatening diseases, both with the Breakthrough therapy designations, show how it is getting common from FDA to approve new drugs based on single clinical trials with smaller sample sizes. The first case is a drug invented in China for a rare cancer, mantle cell lymphoma, was approved based … Read more
Last week’s FDA Warning Letter to Dollar Tree stores should act as a warning to all companies that use contract manufacturers particularly that using overseas manufacturers of FDA regulated products. Dollar Tree’s problems relate to its failure to verify the GMP compliance status of its vendors and failure to heed FDA’s repeated notifications of the … Read more
To export a medical device from US to another country, the manufacturers need the Export Certificate, called the Certificate to Foreign Government (CFG) to clear customs. Most CFGs are issues without much hitch but there are times when FDA denies a CFG for either the device being exported is just to injunction proceedings or seizures … Read more
This week we found that Google has been going through the personal medical data from millions of patients without the patients and most of their doctors knowing about it. Google made a deal with a major hospital system to share private patients data to be used to create new products. A deeper dive shows that … Read more
