With the COVID-19 public health emergency ending in the U.S. next week, Congress is looking to use the lessons learned from the pandemic to draft a new iteration of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act to ensure the country is better prepared for the next pandemic.
With the public health emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly winding down, the U.S. FDA has published guidance for the transition of COVID-specific diagnostic tests and other articles to conventional premarket review mechanisms.
During the first round of discussion at its two-day hearing on a World Trade Organization proposal to expand the intellectual property (IP) waiver from COVID-19 vaccines to diagnostics and therapies, the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) got an earful from both sides of the debate.
The FDA’s emergency use authorization (EUA) program for rapid antigen tests for the COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end, but few rapid antigen test makers have laid out clear plans regarding the post-public health emergency world. Quidelortho Corp. managed to beat the competition to the non-EUA market for these tests with a grant of de novo petition for its Sofia rapid antigen test, which now provides other tests with a predicate device, thus ensuring that this will not be the last such test to reach the U.S. market.
Regulatory snapshots, including global submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Bigfoot Biomedical, Boomerang Medical, Convatec, Cordx, Neuro20.
Any decision on whether to expand a five-year World Trade Organization (WTO) waiver of intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines to diagnostics and therapies likely will be delayed longer than proponents had hoped. WTO members originally were scheduled to vote on expanding the waiver in December, but the deadline was extended indefinitely when key members, including the U.S., pushed for a delay.
The Biden administration has determined that the public health emergency (PHE) for the COVID-19 pandemic will not be renewed and thus will come to an end in the second week of May. While the end of the PHE will affect some Medicare telehealth provisions that have not been memorialized in legislation, the U.S. FDA’s ability to issue emergency use authorizations (EUAs) will not be immediately affected as that authority was invoked by a separate mechanism.
Vaxxas Pty. Ltd. and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) signed a partnership agreement to develop Vaxxas’ vaccine-patch delivery technology in a project that could end the need for frozen storage of mRNA vaccines.
In what is claimed as the largest study of how digital technologies were applied to support population level research during the pandemic, scientists at the U.K. Medical Research Council’s epidemiology unit at Cambridge University have reported high, sustained levels of engagement in a fully remote COVID-19 study that ran at a time when visits to a study center were not possible.
Med-tech happenings, including deals and partnerships, grants, preclinical data and other news in brief: Alithea Genomics, Asahi Kasei, Genetik, Ginkgo Bioworks, Medicines Discovery Catapult, Minxray, Pamgene, Seno Medical Instruments, Smi Drug Discovery, Theralink, Xwell, Zoll.
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