The U.S. CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has two new members, bringing its total membership to 15. As he has done since dismissing the entire ACIP panel last June, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy named the new members, Angelina Farella and Sean Downing, barely two weeks before the next ACIP meeting, March 18-19.
The U.S. FDA’s expectations that its new default position of basing marketing authorization of novel drugs on one adequate, well-controlled trial may be overstated. In explaining the policy in a recent article in TheNew England Journal of Medicine, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and CBER Director Vinay Prasad said they expect the initiative will create a “surge in drug development,” substantially reduce development costs and will speed drugs to market. While the initiative could reduce the time to the U.S. market, those expectations don’t take into consideration global norms and payer expectations.
U.S. scrutiny of China’s trade practices, especially in the biotech sector, continues to escalate as the U.S. International Trade Commission launches two factfinding investigations Congress mandated in the fiscal 2026 appropriations.
Eli Lilly and Co. got a breather when the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the company doesn’t owe Research Corporation Technologies Inc. (RCT) royalties on its diabetes drugs under a licensing agreement Lilly had made with Phillips Petroleum Co. in 1990 and that Phillips later sold to RCT.
China’s National Medical Products Administration has accepted for review Jiuyuan Genetic Biopharmaceutical Co. Ltd.’s drug application for Jikeqin, a biosimilar product to Novo Nordisk A/S’s Wegovy (semaglutide) for obesity.
The U.S. FDA approved Allurion Technologies Inc.’s premarket application for its swallowable gastric balloon system, which features its Smart Capsule, for weight loss. The clearance is boon for the company as GLP-1 agonists gets increasingly adopted to treat obesity. The approval also brings to the market a new non-invasive option to patients looking for alternative ways to lose weight.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy is facing a second lawsuit challenging his replacement of all the members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and seeking to undo the CDC’s Jan. 5 revision of its childhood immunization schedule.
While the annual State of the Union address has morphed over the years from a summation of the state of the U.S. government and the president’s legislative agenda into political theater on both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump did include some recommendations to Congress in his Feb. 24 speech. Among those recommendations was a request for Congress to codify his most-favored-nation pricing policy for prescription drugs.
In yet another upheaval in an agency already racked by upheaval, the U.S. CDC announced Feb. 23 that Ralph Abraham, its principal deputy director, chose to step down, effective immediately, so he could “address unforeseen family obligations.”
In handing a win to Regenxbio Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit also cleared some leaves from the 101 patent eligibility threshold after years of Supreme Court decisions cluttering the passageway.
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