Just weeks after seeing one late-stage candidate hit a wall in a subtype of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), Merck KGaA's EMD Serono has won accelerated approval from the FDA for another important NSCLC therapy, Tepmetko (tepotinib).

The U.S. FDA is still struggling to keep up with the volume of diagnostic emergency use authorizations (EUAs), but it is not for want of effort. Tim Stenzel, director of the FDA’s Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health (OIR), said on the Feb. 3 testing town hall that the agency is processing nine such applications per day, a big jump over the rate of one per day in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research met all action dates for the 53 new molecular entities approved in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, developers of at least 8 drugs continue to wait for a decision beyond their expected timelines.

While the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research met all action dates for the 53 new molecular entities approved in 2020, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, developers of at least 8 drugs continue to wait for a decision beyond their expected timelines.

The U.S. FDA’s safer technologies program, or STeP, may seem uncontroversial, but agency staff said on a Feb. 1 conference call that the program could be delayed by the change in administration at the White House. This is possibly an artifact of the Biden administration’s Jan. 20 executive order (EO) that applies a freeze to federal agency activities for 60 days, an EO that could affect a wide swath of federal agency activity.

Medtronic plc received U.S. FDA premarket approval of its Diamondtemp Ablation (DTA) system for treatment of patients with recurrent, symptomatic paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. The temperature-controlled radiofrequency (RF) ablation system features industrial-grade diamonds, which provide 200 to 400 times the thermal conductivity seen in conventional ablation and enable more efficient delivery of energy to regions of the heart responsible for the erratic electrical signals underlying atrial fibrillation (AF).

The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) had packaged a proposal to redefine the term “reasonable and necessary” along with the proposal to cover FDA-designated breakthrough devices, but ultimately punted on the definitional question until the end of this year. Mark Leahey, president and CEO of the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA), told BioWorld that it may be just as well that the agency didn’t expeditiously push through the reasonable and necessary question because of the enormous complexity of the proposal.

Boston Scientific Corp. has received the U.S. FDA’s nod for its Synergy Megatron drug-eluting stent (DES) system. The company said the premarket approval makes Synergy Megatron the first platform in the U.S. that is designed for large, proximal vessels. The Synergy Megatron biopolymer (BP) stent is indicated “for improving coronary artery luminal diameter in patients with symptomatic ischemic heart disease, stable or unstable angina, non-ST elevation myocardial infarction or documented silent ischemia due to atherosclerotic lesions in native coronary arteries.