The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) needs to do more and act faster to crack down on drug manufacturers that restrict 340B prescription drug discounts to contract pharmacies, two senators said in a letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
The wholesale acquisition cost for Amylyx Pharmaceuticals Inc.'s new U.S. FDA-approved amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) treatment, Relyvrio, has been set at about $158,000 for the first year’s treatment. It jumps to about $163,000 in the second year, the company said, a change that would move it closer to the cost of competitor Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Corp.'s Radicava (edaravone), which costs about $165,000 annually. A 28-day prescription will cost $12,504.
The U.S. Congress passed a five-year reauthorization of the Medical Device User Fee Amendment (MDUFA) agreement, the fifth iteration of this user-fee agreement since the system's implementation in 2002, after many months of back and forth with the med-tech industry. The extension passed as part of a temporary spending bill needed to avoid a partial government shutdown ahead of Friday’s deadline. The spending bill passage gives lawmakers a reprieve until after the midterm elections when they'll need to figure out a longer-term funding plan for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2023.
Stryker Corp. reported the launch of its Q Guidance system for spine applications. The system leverages new optical tracking options via a redesigned camera with the advanced algorithms of the newly released Spine Guidance software.
The individual and population-level health impact of type 2 diabetes is well documented, a fact which recently drove the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) to ask whether screening among asymptomatic individuals aged younger than 18 years would be worth the effort. The answer is that the task force simply does not know, simply because the agency’s literature search turned up no studies that prospectively evaluated the benefits of screening in this population, signaling a missed opportunity for drug and device makers to intervene in this massively costly disease.
U.S. lawmakers concerned about unconfirmed clinical benefit of drugs with accelerated approval got more fodder for their arguments in a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG). According to that report, which was released Sept. 29, Medicare and Medicaid have spent more than $18 billion over the past few years covering 18 drugs granted accelerated approval that haven’t completed their confirmatory trials even though the trial completion dates have passed.
The saga of U.S. FDA regulation of clinical decision support (CDS) software has spanned six years since the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, yielding two FDA draft guidances and a final guidance that emerged only Sept. 27, 2022. Regulatory attorney Brad Thompson blasted the final guidance for its addition of “time-critical decision making” to the definition of a regulated medical device, one of several features he argued are extra-statutory and which effectively handcuff both developers of CDS and the physicians who use their products to aid in selecting drug and device treatments.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is finally making a long-expected, and requested, adjustment to Medicare Part B premiums, which were raised nearly 15% for 2022 in the wake of Biogen Inc.’s initial $56,000 annual price tag for its Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm (aducanumab).
The COVID-19 pandemic may or may not be over, depending on which member of the U.S. government’s executive branch one asks, but the FDA’s device center has drawn much tighter lines around its emergency use authorization (EUA) program for COVID-19 tests.
As part of its obligations under the 21st Century Cures Act, the U.S. FDA is proposing two new rules to harmonize sections of its regulations on human subject protection and institutional review boards with the revised Common Rule, which provides for the protection of human subjects in federally funded research.
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