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.
The FDA has delivered on a final guidance for non-clinical and clinical investigations of devices used for treatment of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), needing only a year and a half to convert the draft guidance into a final version. The final guidance retains the draft’s recommendation that pivotal studies follow patients for at least a year, a provision some in the med-tech industry saw as unnecessary in some instances. The scope of the July 2020 draft included non-clinical testing, a novelty compared to previous guidance on the topic. The scope of this latest guidance includes four product codes, including KNS for endoscopic electrosurgical instruments, and the FDA included several specific suggestions for the use of thermotherapy and permanent prostatic stents as treatments for BPH.
With 2021 coming to a close in just a few weeks, the U.S. FDA is racing to release the guidances it planned to get out the door this year. The regulator issued two draft guidances Dec. 7 detailing key clinical and production considerations to support applications for “N of 1,” or single-subject, clinical trials and drug development programs for severely debilitating or life-threatening diseases.
The U.S. SEC released guidance Nov. 29 that could impact how drug and medical device companies shape, and report, their executive compensation packages when it comes to "spring-loaded awards.”
As part of its real-world evidence (RWE) program, the U.S. FDA released a draft guidance Nov. 29 on using registries to support regulatory decision-making for drugs and biological products.
The FDA’s device center has posted its annual fiscal year guidance agenda, and there are several carry-over items from fiscal 2021. The most conspicuous element of the FY 2022 agenda may be that a draft guidance for change control for artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms rates an entry on the B list rather than the A list, suggesting that the draft is not likely to emerge any time in the next 12 months.
Regulatory agencies are starting to catch up on their guidance agendas, including the European Union’s Medical Device Coordination Group (MDCG), which has posted a guidance for risk classification. Rather than provide a list of risk classes for specific device types, the guidance provides a framework by which the manufacturer does its own evaluation of the inherent risk of the device, opening the door to disagreements between the manufacturer and its notified body.
As part of its real-world evidence (RWE) program, the U.S. FDA is issuing a draft guidance on using electronic health records and medical claims data in clinical trials to support a drug’s safety and effectiveness.
The FDA’s draft guidance for the form and content of unique device identifiers (UDIs) may have lacked the controversy of some other policies, but the 2016 draft languished for five years even though only 10 comments appear in the docket. While the agency made some concessions regarding substantial edits of the draft, the final retains a need for data delimiters in the definition of “easily readable” plain text in UDIs, despite industry’s argument that this was not required in the agency’s UDI rulemaking.
