Another spate of U.S. FDA guidances for prescription drug manufacturers includes updates for carton labeling, product-specific advice and recommendations on mitigating potential drug shortages.
The latest in a spate of draft and final guidances released recently by the U.S. FDA could help sponsors developing drugs to treat early stage solid tumor malignancies.
The U.S. FDA does not have legal authority to impose recalls on most regulated products, making the March 3 final guidance for voluntary recalls a key policy declaration for industry. The guidance recommends that recalling firms make extensive use of electronic communication to announce a recall, but the referenced FDA guidance for electronic communications was finalized in 2006 and makes no reference to social media as an electronic conduit for recall information.
Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address March 1 in which he gave a shoutout to his cancer moonshot initiative, the FDA released a trio of final guidances aimed at speeding the development of new cancer drugs. First launched in 2016 with the goal of doubling the rate of progress against cancer by making a decade worth of advances in five years, the moonshot was reignited last month with a new target following setbacks in cancer screenings and treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Biden’s catch phrase is “ending cancer as we know it.”
Aiming to spur development of non-addictive pain therapies, as part of ongoing efforts to tackle the opioid crisis, the U.S. FDA released draft guidance Feb. 10 that outlines recommendations regarding development of opioid alternatives.
The U.S. FDA appears to be on a roll when it comes to rolling out new guidance pertaining to prescription drugs. In recent days, the agency has released draft guidances on antibody-drug conjugates and immunogenicity information in labeling, revised a draft guidance on assessing pressor effects of drugs and finalized a guidance on population pharmacokinetics.
The guidances for in vitro diagnostics (IVDs) developed by the European Union’s Medical Device Coordination Group (MDCG) are only a reflection of the In Vitro Diagnostic Regulation (IVDR), but they do provide test developers with some important details.
In keeping with its Drug Competition Action Plan released in 2017, the U.S. FDA finalized two guidances this week focused on the submission and review of generic drugs.
More than three years after tossing a controversial proposal to allow manufacturers of generic drugs to update their labeling independent of the reference list drug (RLD) and promises that it would take a more proactive role in identifying and facilitating labeling updates, the U.S. FDA issued a draft guidance Jan. 25 intended to help holders of abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs) keep their labels up to date with that of the RLD.
Within hours of a Jan. 5 vote on COVID-19 boosters for adolescents, U.S. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ (ACIP) recommendation that all adolescents aged 12-17 years should receive a booster dose five months after their primary series. The recommendation applies to the Pfizer Inc.-Biontech SE COVID-19 vaccine, as it’s the only one authorized in the U.S. for use in adolescents.