Faced with a tradeoff between low Medicare premiums that benefit all beneficiaries and lower out-of-pocket costs that benefit the sickest beneficiaries, the Trump administration chose lower premiums, sinking a proposed rule that would have pulled drug rebates from the safe antikickback harbor.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit this week sidestepped some of the concerns raised by the biopharma industry, choosing instead to simply vacate and remand two Patent Trial and Appeal Board's (PTAB) decisions that invalidated patent claims involving the securing of communications over the Internet.

The striking of a Health and Human Services (HHS) rule requiring TV ads for prescription drugs to include list prices may turn up the temperature on the political roasting of biopharma companies – and stoke the pressure for Congress to do something about those prices.

With regulatory science always lagging innovation, ambiguity has long been a certainty at the FDA and is likely to become even more so as the pace of new technologies quickens.

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.

Approval of Alexion Pharmaceutical Inc.'s Soliris (eculizumab) injection to treat neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) in adult patients who are anti-aquaporin-4 (AQP4) antibody positive makes it the first and only FDA-approved treatment. It's also one of the most expensive treatments in the world, making it vulnerable to off-label use and the eventual creep of biosimilars into the market.