The U.S. FDA has several methods for signaling its enforcement intentions regarding medical devices and drugs, but there are times when warning letters are the vectors for communicating the agency’s current thinking.
Following a cumbersome process, the U.S. FDA is withdrawing its accelerated approval for Truseltiq (infigratinib) as a second-line treatment for patients with unresectable locally advanced or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma harboring an FGFR2 fusion or rearrangement as detected by an FDA-approved test.
The U.S. FDA is not the only regulatory agency attempting to deal with impending and existing device and drug shortages, although some of the drivers of these shortages are not within these agencies’ purview. The FDA’s Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay told an audience here in Washington that the poor payment rates offered by payers for generic drugs are a significant contributor, adding that there are instances in which the per-dose rate paid for one of these generics is less than the typical charge for a cup of coffee.
The success of a vaccine, a gene editing design for an untreated disease, or achieving cell engraftment after several attempts, comes from years of accumulated basic science studies, thousands of experiments, and clinical trials. Innumerable steps precede hits in gene and cell therapies before a first-time revelation, and most of them are failures at the time. At the 27th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) in Baltimore last week, several groups of scientists presented achievements that years ago looked impossible.
Artificial intelligence recently roiled the regulatory world, but the U.S. Congress has yet to dive into the task of legislating on the concept. Barrett Tenbarge, general counsel for Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told an audience here in the nation’s capital that while the Senate is considering several legislative proposals, the desire to avoid legislation that will create as many problems as it solves suggest that legislative development “is a long-term process.”
The U.S. FDA’s final rule for regulation of lab-developed tests promises to remain controversial for the foreseeable future, but FDA commissioner Robert Califf said that many of these tests have been shown to be less than adequately reliable. Califf said that one of the effects of the final rule is that it will force clinical labs to “wake up and develop better tests,” if only because compliance and enforcement regimes will soon be applied to clinical labs.
The FDA’s Jeff Shuren appeared on a May 14 webinar to discuss operations at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), but he had some choice words for what he suggested is a widespread do-more-with-less mentality. Shuren said that expectations of CDRH’s capacity are in defiance of what he suggested is a modest volume of revenues the center receives each year, a predicament he said demonstrates that “a lot of people are running around stupid” about the realities at the FDA’s device center.
SN Bioscience Co. Ltd., headquartered in Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do’s second Pangyo Valley, gained U.S. FDA fast track designation for SNB-101 (SN-38), its new polymer nanoparticle cancer drug candidate for small-cell lung cancer.
The U.S. FDA issued a May 9 warning letter to Cue Health Inc., of San Diego, following what may have been a routine inspection, but the inspection disclosed that the company had made changes to a COVID test that was granted market access via the emergency use authorization program.
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