Saudi Arabia, which last year made its first appearance on the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) Priority Watch List, is back on the list this year and is being singled out for an out-of-cycle review due to what the USTR calls its “unfair commercial use” and “unauthorized disclosure” of proprietary data submitted for drug approvals.

The FDA has revised its emergency use authorization (EUA) policy for testing for the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of which falls principally on serological tests for antibodies generated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The agency had previously allowed a commercial antibody test developer to distribute a test without submitting the validation data, but makers of such tests now must forward the validation data to the FDA within 10 days, a move prompted in part by inappropriate claims made by some test developers.

Roche Holding AG, of Basel, Switzerland, has garnered U.S. FDA authorization for emergency use of a test to determine whether people have been infected with the novel coronavirus fueling the COVID-19 pandemic. The Swiss health care giant, which also makes molecular tests to detect active COVID-19 infection, claims its Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody test accurately identifies COVID-19 antibodies in the blood 100% of the time, 14 days post-infection.