The May 25 appearance of Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, before a congressional committee revolved in large part around the Biden administration’s so-called ARPA-H proposal, but the administration’s proposal to waive intellectual property rights for vaccines was also on tap.

With the support of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Institute of Mental Health, researchers at Duke University’s Center for Autism and Brain Development have developed a mobile app that can quickly screen toddlers for autism spectrum disorder without the need for specialized skills.

The impact of MRI procedures on medical devices has been the subject of regulatory concern for better than a decade, but the FDA needed until 2019 to craft a guidance that deals with testing and labeling for such considerations. The final guidance offers several tweaks and adjustments to the 2019 draft, but ignores several requests made by industry, including a request that the final not rely on a clinically relevant worst-case scenario when evaluating the potential for device heating.

In seeming opposition to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai’s support of a proposed compulsory World Trade Organization intellectual property (IP) waiver on COVID-19-related medical products, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris signed onto the G20’s May 21 Rome Declaration that commits the member countries to work to defeat the pandemic within the current flexibilities of the TRIPS agreement by promoting voluntary IP licensing agreements, technology and knowledge transfers, and patent pooling on mutually agreed terms.

The FDA’s November 2019 two-day hearing regarding the use of metals in medical devices generated at least one actionable recommendation, namely that manufacturers disclose all materials used in devices in product labels. The agency has reacted to that recommendation in the form of a discussion paper that proposes to require that product labels provide a deep level of detail regarding the materials found in the device, a notion that received the backing of industry during the November 2019 hearing.

Collectively, lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) are caused by malfunctions in metabolic enzymes in the lysosome system. Depending on which enzyme is missing, toxic metabolites accumulate. While the LSDs are highly heterogenous – even within one disease, presentation can vary widely – neurodegeneration is a common feature in these disorders.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has updated its recommendations for lung cancer screening, which expands the age group for screening to include those aged 50-54 years. The change has forced CMS to reopen the national coverage memo for low-dose CT screening for lung cancer, which appears to be set to add millions to the number of Americans who are eligible for annual screening procedures.