This article offers a selection of 28 publicly available resources for newcomers to the regulatory profession. The author recommends many US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) websites, including information and guideline resources from a number of the agency’s centers and their respective websites and searchable databases.   Introduction The FDA website is the go-to platform for US-related regulatory information ( Table 1 [1]). This multipurpose learning and resea...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday announced it will not begin collecting drug manufacturing volume data next month as required by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act).   Section 3112 of the CARES Act establishes new reporting requirements for drug manufacturers intended to improve the response to drug shortages, including expanding shortage reporting requirements for life-saving drugs to include drugs that are “critical...

Feature articles during May focused on risk management and mitigation in dealing with contractors and vendors and included articles on best practices in good vendor management, use of risk management to support outsourcing activities, testing in-house versus outsourcing, and outsourcing in regulatory operations. Also included were in-depth examinations of challenges and opportunities in “bespoke” therapies, a critical appraisal of drug shortages in Germany and an update on...

This article discusses the advent of bespoke therapies, defined as the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics or symptoms and responses of a patient during all stages of care and as a new frontier beyond personalized medicine. The author covers the revolutionary genetic tools implementing such therapies and the clinical and nonclinical safety perspectives for bespoke therapies. The author concludes that with bespoke therapies we are entering a new...

This article discusses drug shortages in Germany, the root causes of production problems with active pharmaceutical ingredients, and drug product manufacturers. The authors offer analysis from the perspective of a medium-sized generic drug manufacturer. They outline a range of reasons for the shortages, all of which point to a “broken marketplace.” The authors conclude with a discussion of mitigation activities and address the current COVID-19 pandemic. They warn that drug...

Two House committees on Thursday advanced on party-line votes Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) bill to allow for the negotiation of certain medicine prices as part of plans to bring down costs in the US. No major amendments were adopted in either the Energy & Commerce or the Education & Labor committees’ meetings, although the amendments in the E&C meeting ranged from carving out specific disease treatments from negotiations to requiring the Health and Human Services Sec...

For each of the last five years, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set generic drug approval records, but questions have lingered on whether these high approval numbers are translating into competition. FY 2019 figures show a total of 1,171 generic drug approvals (935 full approvals and 236 tentative approvals), which breaks FDA’s previous all-time record of 971 full and tentative approvals for FY 2018 . And although the abbreviated new drug application (...

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) late Friday announced that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) drug pricing bill would reduce federal direct spending for Medicare by $345 billion from 2023 to 2029, but it would also lead to a reduction of approximately 8 to 15 new drugs coming to market over the next 10 years. The CBO report comes as rhetoric on both sides of the aisle has picked up in recent weeks, with industry group PhRMA referring to the bill, known as HR 3, a...

From industry to academia, commenters have argued that the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) drug approval standards are becoming inappropriately low and that the required postapproval evaluations are either inadequate or left undone. But three senior FDA officials offered several counterpoints on Monday at the fifth annual Biopharma Congress in Washington, DC. Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, explained that the agency ...

The Nevada Department of Health and Human Services this week sent letters to 21 diabetes drug manufacturers seeking $17.4 million in penalties for non-compliance with a new price transparency law. “This legislation requires the Department to compile a report of information related to prescription drugs used to treat diabetes. As part of the legislation, the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) can impose a penalty for companies who fail to provide the required...

In remarks related to an executive order on Medicare, President Donald Trump on Thursday gave a speech filled with falsehoods about the Right-to-Try law, claims that drugmakers would lower their prices once importation begins and a suggestion that the pharmaceutical industry is aiding his impeachment. Trump also read from the teleprompter to explain a proposal that’s coming soon to lower drug prices by importing drugs from Canada and other countries. First revealed in ...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday released a warning letter sent in August to China-based drug testing facility Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Industry for refusing an inspection. FDA had planned a surveillance and pre-approval inspection of the facility from 29 November to 4 December 2018, but the company told FDA’s China office in a written response that it was refusing the inspection. "Under section 501(j) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Co...