The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is still considering a drastic overhaul of the 2002 medical device regulatory framework, but may have sent a signal that its new framework won’t deviate too far from established regulatory approaches. The agency reported June 16 that it has signed on with both the International Council for Harmonization (ICH) for drugs and the International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF) for devices, providing members of both industries with at least some modest confidence that access to the 67 million strong U.K. market won’t suffer from a new set of unique regulatory hurdles.

The EU’s Medical Device Coordination Group (MDCG) has advised the device industry that many manufacturers seem ill prepared for the transition to the Medical Device Regulation (MDR), which will be fully in force for all devices as of May 2024. MDCG said that that any leniency shown after that date will be granted only for devices that address an urgent public health need, potentially leaving many existing authorizations out in the cold.

Developers of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms in medical radiology tend to think of regulatory approval as the primary hurdle to market, but there is also the question of how to pay for the use of these products. Public and private payers obviously hold the purse strings, but appealing to payers is still not always as straightforward proposition as some would like, reinforcing the notion that coverage and reimbursement still combine to serve as one of the highest hurdles to market for AI and ML.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for use in medical radiology have made tremendous inroads into clinical practice, but one of the key stakeholder groups, physicians, aren’t always persuaded of the benefits of these software products. In this second installment of a six-part series, BioWorld asked Bibb Allen, Jr., chief medical officer for the Data Science Institute of the American College of Radiology, what physicians want, and what physicians see as a trend toward me-too AI.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted June 8 to pass the legislation reauthorizing a number of user fee programs at the FDA, a welcome bit of good news for FDA-regulated industries. Nonetheless, there are several substantive differences between H.R. 7667 and the parallel Senate bill, differences that may take some doing to overcome before a final bill can be forwarded to the Oval Office.