The run on at-home COVID-19 tests may be for naught. The FDA warned that the popular rapid antigen tests recommended to keep New Year’s Eve revelers, relatives visiting elderly grandparents and workers exposed to the coronavirus from spreading COVID-19 are less likely to detect the Omicron variant than earlier strains of the virus. “Early data suggest that antigen tests do detect the Omicron variant but may have reduced sensitivity,” the agency said in an update on Dec. 29. Despite the higher rate of false negatives, the FDA said individuals should continue to use the tests. Those experiencing symptoms or with a high likelihood of infection based on exposure should follow-up with a molecular test if their antigen test returns a negative result.

PERTH, Australia – Australia should be at the front of the line among developed nations when it comes to innovative drugs and devices, but health policies must evolve to respond to changes in technology and global trends, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) said. Although Australia’s health policy has served the country well, tensions in the system are becoming seismic shifts that mirror international trends, J&J said in a recent report on Australia’s health system.

The Verifying Accurate Leading-edge IVCT Development (VALID) Act seems poised for passage in 2022, a bit of welcome relief for those stuck in the regulatory twilight world of the lab-developed test (LDT). However, Carly McWilliams, director of regulatory policy for North America for Roche Inc., said recently at the recent Food and Drug Law Institute enforcement meeting that the VALID Act is likely to leave the question of a user fee schedule for a future Congress, given that the associated rulemaking, guidance development and compliance activities are likely to consume the better part of, if not the entirety of, the next five years.

In a move that will substantially expand the number of livers available for transplantation, the FDA granted premarket approval to Organox Ltd.’s Metra normothermic machine perfusion device for both donors after brain death (DBD) and donors after circulatory death (DCD). The approval allows preservation of organs by Metra for up to 12 hours.

Some U.S. FDA warning letters are mostly about documentation, but the key consideration in the widely publicized Dec. 9 FDA warning letter to Dublin-based Medtronic plc seems to be whether Medtronic had a proper understanding of the risk created by malfunctioning infusion pump retainer rings. That difference of opinion regarding risk took a significant bite out of the company’s shares and boosted the fortunes of its rivals in the diabetes space, a cautionary tale regarding the hazards associated with a failure to understand how the FDA sees the risk of device malfunction. The FDA had reported in October 2021 a pair of recalls of Medtronic’s Minimed insulin pumps, although one of the issues cited was related to cybersecurity concerns. The two recalls affected nearly half a million units combined, and could have significantly affect access for some patients.

PERTH, Australia – Australian digital health company Resapp Health Ltd. received clearance from Australia’s Therapeutics Good Administration and CE mark certification in the EU for its stand-alone cough counter application that tracks cough frequency using a smartphone. The class I software as a medical device is the first regulatory approval for such an application, which uses Resapp’s machine learning algorithms to identify cough events from audio recorded using the smartphone’s in-built microphone.