The tricky part about the off-label marketing of drugs, or the marketing of drugs to doctors for unapproved indications, is that companies, and not the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), may get to decide what some courts are referring to as “truthful and non-misleading” marketing information. Republican Reps. Fred Upton (MI) and Joe Pitts (PA) on Thursday took FDA to task for the agency’s “inability or unwillingness to publicly clarify its current thinking” on off-l...

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) has found that Shionogi’s “Patient Co-Pay Assistance Voucher” for Ulesfia (benzyl alcohol) lotion to help treat head lice is false or misleading because it omits important risk information. The omission of such risk information means that the voucher misbrands Ulesfia within the meaning of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) and makes its distribution violative, ...

Two Harvard professors are taking issue with the recent landmark court decision allowing some "truthful and non-misleading" off-label pharmaceutical marketing in a new paper, saying “informativeness in asserting scientific facts, rather than truthfulness, ought to be the gold standard for evaluating commercial speech about pharmaceuticals.” Background The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) generally does not allow pharmaceutical companies to promote drugs for unappro...

The UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on Friday said it has reprimanded the dermatology company Galderma after receiving an anonymous complaint about promotional material for a prescription drug shared on the social networking site LinkedIn. MHRA said it upheld the complaint as the UK, unlike the US, does not allow prescription-only medicines to be promoted to the public though it does allow advertisements for over-the-counter medicines, accor...

A US Department of Justice attorney for the first time explained in a set of jury instructions that it is legal for a device company or its sales representatives to provide doctors with “wholly truthful and non-misleading information” about off-label medical device uses. The jury instructions, filed earlier this month by Richard Durbin, Jr., the US Attorney for the Western District of Texas, explain what speech is illegal under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in ...

Officials from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) have shared their perspectives on evaluating treatments for Ebola in two articles appearing in Clinical Trials . The articles discuss some of the challenges the Ebola outbreak presented for studying drugs and vaccines to treat the disease. At the time the outbreak began, no products existed to treat Ebola, and those that were in development had not been tested in humans. Study ...

This article provides a high-level introduction to the Chinese regulatory framework, including requirements for marketing approval of imported drugs. An increasing number of pharmaceutical companies based outside China are interested in marketing their products in China as evidenced by the increasing number of clinical trial and marketing applications submitted by foreign companies. Obtaining marketing authorization approval equal to an Import Drug License (IDL) approv...

In 2015, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) maintained its momentum from 2014 , granting 93 positive opinions, 39 of which were for new active substances. The agency also recommended 18 orphan drugs for approval, breaking last year's record of 17. Notably, EMA trailed just behind the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) for the year. In 2015, CDER approved 45 new drugs, 21 of which had been granted orphan drug designati...

The article analyzes the proportion of FDA Advisory Committees specifically asked to discuss or vote on issues related to post-approval safety activities. Introduction Preparing effectively for a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Advisory Committee meeting requires the sponsor team's anticipation of discussion and voting topics FDA will pose to the advisory panel. Discussion topics and voting questions will influence information the team provides to the panel as w...

Late next year, the European Commission will begin reviewing the pharmaceutical company fee system that helps fund the European Medicines Agency (EMA). “The effectiveness and the efficiency of the system will be examined notably with respect to the sustainability and the fairness of the financial model of the fees charged by EMA to industry at large, including the remuneration paid by EMA to rapporteurs and experts from national competent authorities,” the commission sai...

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has issued a new guidance to help companies applying to its adaptive pathways pilot. Background EMA launched its adaptive pathways pilot in 2014 to speed access to new medicines in areas of "high medical need" by leveraging existing approval pathways to support "early and progressive patient access" to new medicines. Under the pilot, drugs would either be authorized conditionally or in a staggered fashion by narrow indication befor...

By the time "first-in-class" drugs receive marketing approval in the US, nearly all later iterations of those products have begun clinical testing or filed a new drug application with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to a new study by Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The study, which compared 40 drug classes with a first-in-class approval between 1998 and 2011, found that the race for marketing approval for new classes of drugs and biol...