After more than a decade of industry pleading for guidance on Orange Book patent listings, the U.S. FDA is finally planning on answering that request this year. If the guidance that’s produced reflects the FTC’s position that device patents can’t be listed for combination products, it could overturn years of accepted practice and possibly hinder the development of new, more advanced drug administration technologies.
Unless there’s a last-minute meeting of the minds, it looks like any extension of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) five-year intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines will be shelved, at least for now.
Citing national security and intellectual property (IP) concerns, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is calling on three federal departments to investigate China’s Wuxi Apptec’s ties, and that of its subsidiary, Wuxi Biologics, to the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s People’s Liberation Army.
Citing national security and intellectual property (IP) concerns, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is calling on three federal departments to investigate China’s Wuxi Apptec’s ties, and that of its subsidiary, Wuxi Biologics, to the Chinese Communist Party and the country’s People’s Liberation Army.
Seeking the root causes and possible solutions to the chronic drug shortages plaguing the U.S. health care system, the FTC and Health and Human Services jointly issued a request for information regarding how group purchasing organizations and drug wholesalers may be contributing to the shortages of generic drugs.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit made it clear that it’s the court’s purview, not a jury’s, to determine whether an expert’s testimony is “relevant and reliable” when it comes to issues such as causation. It gave that lesson Feb. 13 when it affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of multi-district litigation in which the plaintiffs claimed that Onglyza (saxagliptin) and Kombiglyze (saxagliptin/metformin hydrochloride), developed by Astrazeneca plc and Bristol Myers Squibb Co., caused their heart failure.
The demand for semaglutide, a GLP-1 drug, and other popular prescription weight-loss drugs is adding to the U.S. FDA’s regulatory load as more and more companies are offering unapproved knockoffs of the products directly to consumers. The FDA posted two warning letters Feb. 13 – to Miami-based US Chem Labs and a New-York company, Synthetix Inc. doing business as Helix Chemical Supply – citing the companies for misbranding unapproved semaglutide and tirzepatide, also a GLP-1 drug, by marketing them on the Internet, along with claims about their therapeutic benefits.
One down, eight to go. That’s the scorecard for the constitutional challenges to mandatory Medicare drug price negotiations now that a U.S. federal court has dismissed a suit filed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the National Infusion Center Association and the Global Colon Cancer Association.
Weaving in a loose regulatory end from March 2020 when it deemed nearly 100 NDAs as BLAs, the U.S. FDA released a final rule codifying its current approach to the use of drug master files for those products and their potential biosimilar competition.
