Next Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions will vote on the five-year reauthorization of the four US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug, medical device, biosimilar and generic drug user fee agreements. The current, five-year agreements are set to expire 30 September 2017, though if Congress fails to act before its summer recess, thousands of FDA employees would receive layoff notices. The proposed reauthorizations, grouped ...

The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee on Thursday advanced Dr. Scott Gottlieb’s nomination to lead the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The 14-9 vote, a day after a delay , was largely along party lines (Democrat Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) voted aye) and follows a back and forth on Gottlieb’s experience seen in the hearing to consider his nomination. Prior to the vote, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) praised ...

Senate HELP Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) on Wednesday delayed an expected vote on Scott Gottlieb's nomination to head the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Alexander said the vote was being delayed to give senators more time to "consider whatever information they want to consider and fit the schedules of senators who are all over the capital." According to Committee Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA), senators would need the extra time to review Gottli...

The Senate Health, Labor, Education & Pensions Committee on Wednesday offered praise and only a few muted attacks against Scott Gottlieb, President Donald Trump's nominee to be the next commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). While Democrats focused their questions in the hearing on Gottlieb’s conflicts of interest, how he’ll bring down drug prices and solve the opioid crisis, his work as a consultant and employee of pharmaceutical and biotech companie...

The US Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee on Tuesday pressed three top US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials for details on how plans to reauthorize their user fee programs would help to further streamline medical product approvals. All three officials highlighted the past successes of the user fee programs, and overall, it did not seem as though user fee goals letters would be reworked or that further negotiations would be needed before the b...

The European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) Pediatric Committee has offered a couple of comments, slight tweaks and further suggestions for the International Council for Harmonisation’s (ICH) draft question and answer document on its S9 guideline on the nonclinical evaluation for anticancer pharmaceuticals. The committee points to a couple of references in the Q&A on S9 on the scope of the guideline and the statement that "the need for juvenile toxicity testing sho...

The group tasked with developing the standards for insurance claims forms on Wednesday recommended including unique device identifiers (UDI) on claims forms. Specifically, the Accredited Standards Committee X12 recommended that the device identifier portion of a UDI be included when high-risk devices are implanted or removed "due to safety concerns about premature failure." The recommendations are now undergoing a three-month consultation ending on 2 May 2017. Following...

The European Parliament’s Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) committee on Tuesday backed a draft report calling on the commission to analyze the impact of intellectual property on pharmaceutical access, as well as review the regulatory framework for orphan medicines, among other provisions. The draft , which a spokeswoman for the European Parliament told Focus that a final version will be made public by the end of this week, covers a menagerie of differ...

This article summarizes 10 years of experience with paediatric regulations in the EU. Introduction Almost 10 years ago, on 27 January 2007, new Paediatric Legislation (PL) came into force that reshaped the regulatory landscape for paediatric medicines in Europe. 1, 2 The objective of this Paediatric Regulation (PR) is to improve the health of children in the European Union (EU) by: facilitating the development and availability of medicines for children from birth ...

In a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt on Friday, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General Daniel Levinson calls on CMS to work with the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 to incorporate unique device identifiers (UDIs) for implantable devices into insurance claims forms. According to Levinson, doing so could help CMS keep track of the costs associated with recalled and defective me...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday clarified that it plans to hold only one advisory committee meeting for each of the first new biosimilars for a reference product, though it may hold more if there are particular issues or concerns with a specific biosimilar application. Marjorie Shapiro, chief of the laboratory of molecular and developmental immunology at FDA, told attendees at the annual PDA/FDA conference in Washington, DC, that the first biosimi...

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Arthritis Advisory Committee on Tuesday voted unanimously to support Amgen’s biosimilar for AbbVie’s blockbuster biologic Humira (adalimumab). The vote – 26-0, with no abstentions – followed the release of a positive review from FDA staff, and came after a lot of discussion on whether the data presented by Amgen could be extrapolated to all of the indications that Humira is approved for, as well as questions on analytical ch...