At a recent Cabinet meeting, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy reportedly said he expected Trumprx to probably go live within 10 days. That was Jan. 29, two days before HHS was once again forced to shut down many of its activities due to a congressional gridlock over a fiscal 2026 appropriations package to keep the department and several others open beyond Jan. 30.
Rolling out guidance to help pharma manufacturers provide direct-to-consumer drugs at lower prices, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) clarified ways to eliminate the middlemen while still abiding by the federal anti-kickback statute.
The FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health has withdrawn its December 2017 final guidance for clinical evaluation of software as a medical device, a development that seems to align with recent relaxation of digital health product regulation, but which might also be seen as the consequence of an ill-advised case of regulatory copy and paste.
Like the federal district court before it, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said it lacks jurisdiction to rule on the merits of Novo Nordisk A/S’ claim that the CMS violated the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) when it treated six of the company’s insulin aspart products as one negotiation-eligible single-source drug.
The U.S. FDA device center’s guidance agenda for fiscal 2026 is the classic case of something old and something new, but what was borrowed from FY 2025 may make some blue.
The U.S. FDA issued a pair of final guidances this week, including one that outlines the criteria for authorizing emergency use of unapproved in vitro diagnostic tests during future public health emergencies and another on software assurance in computer and data processing systems for medical device production.
The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has issued its first official guidance on how to develop bacteriophages as licensed medicinal products. This covers personalized phage therapies designed for specific patients – at present the only form in which they are available – but also is relevant to the development of off-the-shelf products for treating common infections.
The U.S. FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health is recovering from a guidance drought that spanned several months in the first part of calendar year 2025, starting with a guidance on the Q-sub process.
The U.S. FDA’s device center disclosed its guidance ambitions for this new fiscal year – a list that includes the usual A and B lists for draft and final guidances. However, the agency now has an “under construction” list of guidance ambitions, the status of which is entirely reliant on the agency’s resources.
The U.S. FDA has guidances on the books for dental products, but the it unleashed a quartet of guidances – ceramics and cements used in dental procedure – for dental products on the final Friday of September 2024. The agency also issued a guidance without comment – unusual for the FDA – for the well-known, terror-striking pneumatic dental hand tool.
