After a nine-month review, the Biden administration is preparing to go where all other U.S. administrations have refused to trod. In releasing a draft framework to help federal agencies decide whether to exercise a federal march-in on patent rights protecting taxpayer-supported drugs and other inventions, including medical devices, the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology included price as a factor in considering whether a product is “reasonably” available, as required under the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act.
With the number of high-priced cell and gene therapies expected to grow dramatically over the next decade, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) is asking for input from patients, doctors, manufacturers, payers and policy wonks on how to pay for the treatments and ensure patient access when they become more mainstream across the ultra-rare disease spectrum.
The U.S. FDA put out a safety warning Nov. 28 that antiseizure drugs levetiracetam and clobazam can cause a rare but serious hypersensitivity drug reaction that may start as a rash but can progress to injure internal organs. In addition, U.K. health care providers are being told to get a plan in place now to implement the first phase of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s new regulatory measures to reduce the risks of valproate, a treatment for epilepsy and bipolar disorder.
Reports of T-cell malignancies, including lymphoma, have the U.S. FDA investigating the risks for patients who received certain autologous CAR T-cell immunotherapies.
With drug shortages becoming a fact of life, U.S. President Joe Biden said he plans to issue a presidential determination to broaden the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) authorities under the Defense Production Act to enable investment in the domestic manufacturing of essential medicines, medical countermeasures and other critical inputs that the president deems essential to the national defense.
With U.S. drug prices a perennial issue, several lawmakers, both Democrats and Republicans, are increasingly looking beyond biopharma to identify other “persons of interest” that may be complicit in the high list prices facing American patients.
The U.S. FTC’s policing of Orange Book patent listings begs the question of when, and whether, the FDA will deliver on its commitment to provide more clarity on the types of device patents that can be listed as covering a “drug product.”
From the start of the Nov. 16 Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee meeting, the U.S. FDA made it clear that withdrawing Acrotech Biopharma Inc.’s peripheral T-cell lymphoma drugs, Folotyn (pralatrexate) and Beleodaq (belinostat), from the market until a long-overdue confirmatory trial is completed is not an option given the current treatment landscape.
The U.S. FDA’s Pulmonary-Allergy Drugs Advisory Committee has a lot to discuss Nov. 17, but only one voting question: Does the evidence demonstrate that Merck & Co. Inc.’s gefapixant provides a clinically meaningful benefit to adults with refractory or unexplained chronic cough?
If everything goes according to the current plan, the U.S. FDA would get the final report of a confirmatory trial for Acrotech Biopharma Inc.’s Folotyn (pralatrexate) and Beleodaq (belinostat) in 2030 – more than two decades after Folotyn received accelerated approval to treat relapsed or refractory peripheral T-cell lymphoma and 16 years after Beleodaq was granted accelerated approval for the same indication.
