Medical devices and diagnostics are patent-dependent items, and companies may be able to avail themselves of extensions of their patents due to the time taken for FDA regulatory review. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced March 8 that it had granted Neovasc Medical Ltd. a one-year extension of the term of two patents for the company’s flagship Reducer device, thus giving the company one additional year of market exclusivity to obtain the FDA’s approval for the device.

The potholes in the U.S. FDA’s accelerated approval path could be paved over by a bill introduced in Congress this week. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, introduced the Accelerated Approval Integrity Act March 8 to keep the path open to innovative drugs where there is unmet need while streamlining the process for taking drugs off the market when they don’t prove clinical benefit in a timely manner.

The FDA continues its tight surveillance of rapid antigen tests for the COVID-19 pandemic and has issued three safety communications advising against the use of these tests thus far in the month of March. In each instance, the test is made by the manufacturer of name, but was not authorized in the U.S., making these misbranded products despite their legal use in other nations.

The U.S. FDA does not have legal authority to impose recalls on most regulated products, making the March 3 final guidance for voluntary recalls a key policy declaration for industry. The guidance recommends that recalling firms make extensive use of electronic communication to announce a recall, but the referenced FDA guidance for electronic communications was finalized in 2006 and makes no reference to social media as an electronic conduit for recall information.

The FDA’s proposal to harmonize the Quality System Regulation (QSR) with ISO 13485 has finally become more than just a hot topic among device makers, and the agency held a March 2 advisory hearing on the matter. One of the critical concerns for industry is the proposal of a one-year term of implementation upon publication of a final harmonization rule, a timeline that some argue should be doubled or tripled in order to serve as a practicable implementation timeline.

A Seattle-based startup has secured breakthrough device designation for its blood-based Alzheimer’s disease (AD) test. Altpep Corp.’s Soba-AD platform is designed to selectively detect toxic forms of amyloid-beta peptide associated with AD progression. The company said early data indicated the assay can detect AD before symptoms including cognitive impairment and neurodegeneration arise.

Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address March 1 in which he gave a shoutout to his cancer moonshot initiative, the FDA released a trio of final guidances aimed at speeding the development of new cancer drugs. First launched in 2016 with the goal of doubling the rate of progress against cancer by making a decade worth of advances in five years, the moonshot was reignited last month with a new target following setbacks in cancer screenings and treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, Biden’s catch phrase is “ending cancer as we know it.”

The FDA has published an updated guidance for the appeals process at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, but the issuance of that guidance did not happen in a vacuum. Mark Duval, president of Duval & Associates in Minneapolis, told BioWorld that industry is filing more appeals of premarket decisions of late, an uptick he said is an artifact of the practice of FDA reviewers more commonly asking for additional data for these applications.