Francis Collins, director of the U.S. NIH, said in a public forum that the agency is "really bullish" about precision medicine. However, while precision medicine requires mounds of data, which soon may be available, Collins said the NIH All of Us research program has drawn the interest of more than 300,000 willing participants to date, adding that the target enrollment of 1 million should be accomplished before the end of 2022.

The FDA's September 2018 draft guidance for considerations of benefit-risk determinations for several device types, including PMAs, said that the agency "intends" to hold an advisory committee hearing if the FDA has any questions about the post-market data generated by the accompanying post-approval study. The final guidance pulls back on that language, but only slightly, stating that the agency "generally expects" to hold an advisory hearing in this circumstance, a difference in language that may or may not translate to a difference in function.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. agreed to pay the state of California $69 million in what California Attorney General Xavier Becerra Monday called the largest pay-for-delay settlement received by any state. 

In what it called one of the largest pharmaceutical settlements on behalf of end payers in an antitrust case in the last decade, law firm Hausfeld reported this week that it reached a $55 million settlement with Celgene Corp. in a long-running class action, In re Thalomid and Revlimid Antitrust Litigation. 

The FDA's Arthritis Advisory Committee (AAC) Thursday will consider a supplemental new drug application for Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH's Ofev (nintedanib) capsules as a treatment for systemic sclerosis-associated interstitial lung disease (SSc-ILD). 

The U.K.'s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said Monday it will be reviewing the methods it uses to develop guidance on drugs, medical devices and diagnostics so it can optimize its evaluation methods to ensure high quality and good value. 

Given improvements that Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis AG made to its patient access program for Kisqali (ribociclib), the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is recommending the drug, used with fulvestrant chemotherapy, as an option for people with hormone receptor-positive, HER2-negative, locally advanced or metastatic breast cancer who have had previous endocrine therapy.