The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) finalized the Medicare inpatient prospective payment system for fiscal year 2024 with a number of new and renewed new technology add-on payments (NTAPs) for the coming fiscal year. Controversially, however, the agency retained a proposal from the draft that requires that a product have received market authorization from the FDA by no later than May 1 of the prior fiscal year to qualify for NTAP payment, a provision that industry has blasted as exclusionary of products that merit an NTAP payment.
The FDA’s recent clearance of Ultrasight Inc.’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ultrasound guidance technology will allow for the widespread detection of heart diseases in the U.S. and ease bottlenecks in the healthcare system that currently restrict access for many people, Davidi Vortman, CEO of Ultrasight told BioWorld. Ultrasight’s software helps medical professionals without sonography experience acquire cardiac ultrasound images at the point of care in multiple settings.
Device recalls pop up with no regard to human appreciation for seasonality, and thus it was that recalls involving three major medical device makers emerged as the steamy month of July gave way to the arid, oppressive swelter of August. These recalls affected more than 7,500 units of the Trusignal pulse oximeter by GE Healthcare Technologies Inc., nearly 23,000 units of the Sigma Spectrum and Spectrum IQ infusion pumps by Baxter Healthcare Corp., and an unspecified number of units of the Carina ventilator by Drägerwerk AG, all of which adds a little more than the usual heat to the device industry’s dog days.
Regulatory snapshots, including global submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Alucent, Sonio.
The FDA has cleared Qualigen Therapeutics Inc.’s IND application for QN-302, a potential best-in-class small molecule G-Quadruplex (G4)-selective transcription inhibitor.
Lexeo Therapeutics Inc. has announced that its IND for LX-2020 has been cleared by the FDA. LX-2020 is an AAVrh10-based gene therapy candidate designed to intravenously deliver a functional PKP2 gene to cardiac muscle for the treatment of arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (ACM) caused by variants in PKP2 (PKP2-ACM).
Entrada Therapeutics Inc. has received authorization from the U.K.’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Research Ethics Committee (REC) for its CTIMP (clinical trial of an investigational medicinal product) application for a phase I clinical trial in healthy volunteers for ENTR-601-44.
A huge sigh of relief from the life sciences industry greeted U.S. President Joe Biden’s executive order that’s intended to shore up domestic manufacturing of products developed with taxpayer support. “It’s like the Titanic, [but] we just missed the iceberg,” Joseph Allen, executive director of the Bayh-Dole Coalition, told BioWorld. The fear for the past few years has been that the administration would follow in the wake of the Department of Energy, which broadly expanded the current Bayh-Dole U.S. manufacturing preference.
The U.S. FDA unveiled a proposal to once again reshuffle its operations, this time with a greater degree of emphasis on the function of the Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA). Tim Philips, a consultant with Gardner Law and a former member of the FDA, told BioWorld that while these changes will likely yield some useful efficiencies, they might also dilute some of the more useful interaction between industry and FDA, a loss that may be keenly felt when it comes to matters such as FDA inspections.
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