As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) continues to push his own competing drug pricing legislation in the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) unveiled her proposal to lower prescription drug prices on Thursday, with a plan likely to please more liberal Democrats and further distance Republicans. At the heart of Pelosi’s plan is the idea to allow Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar to select between 25 and 250 drugs annually and directly negotiate with manufactur...

More than 50 academics and researchers from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and other universities around the world are calling on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to not replace its original reviews of medical products with an “integrated review” because of the valuable information that would be lost. The researchers claimed that such a shift would deprive them of information and data on the clinical studies and trials submitted to FDA, information on the postmar...

In a report to Congress, the US Food and Drug Administration said that there is a public health need for additional pediatric information in labeling for over one-third of approved orphan indications that are relevant in the pediatric population. FDA research, conducted as part of the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017  (FDARA), found that of all drugs that were approved for an orphan indication between 1 April 1999 and 31 August 2018, a total of 548 orphan indications we...

As drug shortages continue to increase in the US, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) on Wednesday sent a letter to Acting US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Ned Sharpless seeking more information on what FDA will do. Peters, ranking member of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, called FDA’s current efforts to combat shortages “not sufficient, given the current state of rising drug shortages in our nation.” He also wrote that he’s “increasin...

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced four bills to the Senate floor, three of which were bipartisan, and all meant to lower the prices of prescription drugs. The four bills are part of a coordinated push in the Senate and include a larger bill that advanced Wednesday out of the Senate health committee and is expected to be taken up on the Senate floor before the end of July, and another bill that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said he was likely to advance ...

In a report released Monday, the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Pharmaceutical Quality (OPQ) provides a look at the pharmaceutical quality landscape for drugs and biologics intended for the US market.   The report itself breaks down different metrics related to product quality and manufacturer compliance with current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) to paint a picture of the overall pharmaceutical quality landscape.   While FDA reports an overa...

A citizen petition filed last week by law firm Goodwin Procter on behalf of Pennsylvania-based drugmaker Braeburn calls on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revoke the orphan designation granted to Indivior’s opioid use disorder treatment Sublocade (buprenorphine extended-release injection).   “Sublocade is not now, nor was it ever a bona fide orphan drug, particularly since more than two million Americans currently are afflicted by opioid addiction,” the pe...

Patient groups, drugmakers and other organizations are calling for changes to the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) recently revised draft guidance on developing drugs to treat rare diseases.   The 24-page draft guidance was revised last February after first being published in 2015. The revision included updates to the agency’s approach to natural history studies, a discussion of issues for evaluating biomarkers for consideration as surrogate endpoints and a ne...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday finalized guidance on the nonclinical studies drugmakers should conduct when developing products to treat severely debilitating or life-threatening hematologic disorders (SDLTHDs).   FDA classifies SDLTHDs as hematologic conditions that cause shorter life expectancy or greatly diminished quality of life even with available treatments.   FDA notes that the guidance does not apply to hematologic cancers and covers...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday announced it will go ahead with a survey of healthcare professionals (HCPs) on how they are impacted by prescription drug promotion aimed at a professional audience.   The announcement comes after the agency consulted on its plans for  the survey in March 2018 and follows two earlier surveys that looked at HCPs’ attitudes toward direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. The survey will also include questions about HCPs’...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday sought to quell a series of media reports raising questions with the agency’s declining inspectional work around the globe and concerns with the agency’s oversight of generic drugs. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Director Janet Woodcock wrote in an extended statement that recent press reports inaccurately raised questions with the quality of the US drug supply and wron...

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday that federal prosecutors intervened in a lawsuit under the False Claims Act whistleblower provisions against a former supplier of blood glucose monitoring supplies. The case alleges that Arriva Medical and its parent company Alere “submitted or caused false claims to the Medicare program for medically unnecessary glucometers and paid kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries in the form of free glucometers and copayment w...