The FDA’s June 2021 draft guidance for remanufacturing of medical devices wades into a highly complicated area of compliance for third-party servicing organizations that may not be familiar with FDA regulations, but the draft has sparked another set of concerns. Two trade associations said the draft would seem to suggest that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) must disclose confidential trade secrets to give these third parties the information needed to service these devices, a suggestion that both the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA) and the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) said is clearly out of bounds.
As part of a series of guidances addressing clinical trial diversity, the U.S. FDA issued a draft guidance April 13 focused on improving enrollment of participants from underrepresented racial and ethnic populations.
As part of its ongoing effort to speed drug pricing competition in the U.S. through the development of generics, the FDA is releasing another batch of draft and revised draft product-specific guidances on the design of bioequivalence studies to support abbreviated new drug applications. Among the 30 new draft guidances is one specific to remdesivir, which was approved in October 2020 as a COVID-19 treatment.
The U.S. FDA often has difficulty turning around draft guidances into final guidances in a timely manner, but that hasn’t impeded the agency’s appetite for fast turnaround of industry responses to FDA mandated postmarket surveillance studies. Nonetheless, the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA) said in comments to the docket for the May 2021 draft guidance for Section 522 postmarket surveillance studies that a requirement that such a study be fully enrolled within 24 months should be aspirational rather than compulsory.
The FDA has posted a draft guidance responding to changes in the law regarding device shortages during public health emergencies. The guidance says that manufacturers should advise the FDA of any impending shortages, but the key qualifier, that of a “meaningful disruption” in production, may be sowing confusion in the industry.
The FDA has posted two draft guidances for the transition of policies from the pandemic to more normal times. One of these is the long-awaited draft for transitioning a device from an emergency use authorization (EUA) to a conventional premarket status, which offers a 180-day grace period for an EUA after the agency identifies a date on which the EUA will be terminated.
The COVID-19 pandemic shone an unsparing light on counterfeit devices, but the FDA has previously enjoyed only limited authority to deal with those products. Thanks to legislation passed in January 2021, the agency now has authority to destroy imported counterfeit devices, including those combined with counterfeit drugs. The agency has had authority to destroy counterfeit drugs for a number of years, but that authority did not extend to counterfeit devices until passage of the Safeguarding Therapeutics Act of 2020, which was signed into law in January 2021.
The FDA’s device center has revisited the 2005 guidance for the content of premarket submissions for device software functions, a document that puts much more emphasis on risk compared to the legacy 2005 guidance.
The FDA unveiled a draft guidance addressing the responsibilities of clinical investigators for safety reporting for investigational drugs and devices, a novel attempt to combine the disparate adverse event reporting timelines for investigational drugs and devices.
