The House Energy and Commerce Committee will convene Thursday to markup its portions of the budget reconciliation bill that will contain President Joe Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.   The budget reconciliation process was created under the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 and enables Congress to fast-track legislation related to taxes, spending and debt limits. Democrats have opted to use the process to allow them to pass the stimulus package...

This article provides an overview for writing up the biological drug substance manufacturing process and process controls. The authors provide an example for the manufacturing of biological drugs consisting of a cytokine. They cover several complex manufacturing steps and details expected to be included in Section 3.2.S.2.2 (Description of Manufacturing Process and Process Controls) of the Common Technical Document (CTD) for the Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Us...

With Democrats controlling the House, the specifics of President Donald Trump’s Fiscal 2020 budget, released on Monday, may not matter much, but it does feature new attempts to alter US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) processes in order to increase generic drug competition. Similarly to last year’s budget , the 2020 budget looks to save more than $1 billion in Medicare and Medicaid funds by stopping some generic drug applicants, who file first and win tentative appr...

With less than a month remaining before the UK exits the EU, the UK’s National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) on Thursday provided an update in the event of a no-deal Brexit scenario.   In the update, the NIBSC, which produces and distributes a wide range of biological reference materials and functions as the UK’s official medicines control laboratory for biological products, says that while a Brexit deal “remains the Government’s top priority”...

The House and Senate passed a seven-bill spending package on Thursday to fund large portions of the federal government through FY2019. And President Donald Trump has said he will sign the bill.   The spending package comes near the end of a three-week stopgap funding measure to allow the government to reopen after a record 35-day partial government shutdown that began on 22 December 2018 after President Donald Trump refused to sign a short-term spending bill over his...

Thanks to the 21st Century Cures Act , the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday published new draft guidance to help stakeholders submit a proposed draft guidance on patient experience data. The 12-page draft guidance, which provides information in a Q&A format, addresses questions relating to both guidance development and other potential pathways for contributing patient experience data. “Today’s guidance document is part of our commitment to advance p...

While noting that the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) has reached some important milestones in 2018, CDER Director Janet Woodcock also unveiled the center’s priorities for 2019 at the CMS/FDA Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. “We’ve generally accomplished what we set out to do” in 2018, she said, noting that in the generic drug space, “we’ve reached a steady state,” while in the new molecular entity (NME) space...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday released its priorities for addressing compounded drugs in 2018 after years of developing policies to improve its oversight. Background In recent years, FDA has worked to update its policies on compounded drugs in response to a 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak linked to the New England Compounding Center that led to at least 60 deaths and new requirements brought on by the Drug Quality and Security Act (DQSA) of 201...

A bill making its way through Congress could end up having "potentially disastrous consequences" for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and public health, professors from the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law at Harvard Medical School and the Georgia State University College of Law, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. The bill, known as the Regulatory Accountability Act , has been promoted as a way to decrease burdensome regul...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday issued draft guidance detailing its policy for when packages and homogenous cases of drugs without a product identifier are grandfathered from certain provisions of the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). While the guidance comes two years after the deadline set by the DSCSA and on the same day that requirements for manufacturers to begin affixing or imprinting product identifiers on packages and homogenous cases ...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has made it a priority to find a balance between encouraging innovative medical products and increasing access to lower-cost pharmaceuticals under the Hatch-Waxman Act 1984 . But when it comes to finding ways to speed the influx of generic drugs and stop frequently cited abuses, a host of voices from industry, academia and Congress are offering differing views. In July, FDA held a meeting to discuss certain situations in ...

While recent reports have claimed that drugmakers are manipulating the incentives provided by the Orphan Drug Act , Mike Lanthier, an operations research analyst at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), says that in most cases, the act is working as intended. "My sense is that the Orphan Drug Act has been a successful catalyst for spurring rare disease development," Lanthier said at the National Organization for Rare Disorders' (NORD) Summit in Washington, DC on ...