U.S. FDA warning letters have been a staple of regulatory life since the late 1990s, but James Boiani, a regulatory attorney with Epstein, Becker & Green P.C., said it’s no stretch of the imagination that warning letter volumes will jump in 2021. This is to some extent because the volume of warning letters dropped significantly over the past four years, and Boiani advised that all FDA-regulated industries will see more warning letters unless they are communicative with the agency about inspectional findings.
The latest global regulatory news, changes and updates affecting medical devices and technologies, including: FDA slaps two companies for illicit COVID offerings; FDA approves new PET imaging agent for prostate cancer.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the U.S. FDA on the postmarket side as well as on the premarket side, but the focus of pandemic-driven warning letters has shifted over time. Amanda Johnston, senior attorney at Gardner Law of Stillwater, Minn., said on a Nov. 5 webinar the FDA’s emphasis lately has been closer to the agency’s traditional enforcement considerations after an initial wave of warnings dealing with flatly fraudulent products.
Life science companies doing business during a pandemic may believe that patients, judges and juries will look kindly on products that don’t perform as promised, but that may be an empty wish.
Life science companies doing business during a pandemic may believe that patients, judges and juries will look kindly on products that don’t perform as promised, but that may be an empty wish. Angela Seaton, an attorney with the D.C. office of Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP, advised that companies that want to break into new markets because of pandemic-specific demand should do their homework, including a review of U.S. FDA warning letters.
The FDA’s 15-day deadline for responses to warning letters has long been a sore spot for device makers, who might argue that some of the more complex regulatory findings require more than 15 days to analyze and address. That same timeline was found in both the draft and final versions of the non-binding feedback guidance for device inspections despite industry’s pleas that such a tight deadline leads to rushed judgment and potentially inadequate responses by managers at the manufacturing site.
The FDA’s device center has resumed a more normal pace of warning letter issuance in recent months, and the latest batch posted to the warning letter website features warning letters to one device maker in Europe and three firms in Asia. One U.S. firm, Steiner Biotechnology LLC, of Henderson, Nev., also received a warning, however, which is the second the company has received since June 2017.
FDA warning letters to device makers have been conspicuous in their paucity in recent years, but they have been surfacing with greater frequency over the past few months.
The FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) issued 62% more warning letters under the first part of the Trump administration than it did during the last few years of the Obama administration. But the number of warnings for medical devices, food and tobacco products fell sharply under President Donald Trump, according to an investigative report being published in the July 5 issue of Science.
In the words of former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, the five-week government shutdown that ended Jan. 25 was "the most difficult operational challenge we have faced in modern times." While the full impact of that challenge could ripple through the FDA for a while, it made little difference in the number of warning letters the agency sent out between Dec. 23 and Jan. 25.