The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday issued a new draft guidance detailing its approach to determining whether advisory committee members can participate in decisions when the appearance of a conflict might signal an actual conflict of interest. FDA maintains around 50 advisory committees, comprised of experts from outside the agency, to weigh in on specific scientific and medical issues. These committees are typically convened when FDA wants input on a n...

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday held a meeting with a panel of experts to discuss a recently introduced bill that seeks to stop branded drug companies from misusing Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) to withhold access to drug samples for bioequivalence testing necessary for bringing generic drugs to market. Background The bill, known as the CREATES Act and introduced last week , focuses on two tactics often employed by the branded drugmakers to...

At a congressional hearing in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said that current incentives are not enough to overcome the challenges of developing new drugs to fight bacterial infections. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is increasingly being recognized as a global threat to public health. In its 2014 Antimicrobial Resistance: Global Report on Surveilla...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a waiver to allow the chairman of its Circulatory System Devices advisory panel to keep his position later this month despite a conflict of interest. Richard Page, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, currently serves as chairman of the Circulatory System Devices advisory committee, which reviews and evaluates data concerning the safety and effective...

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen is suing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in federal court over the agency's practice of redacting information in the curricula vitae (CV) of its advisory committee members. Public Citizen alleges that the redactions mask information about these outside experts that could reveal potential biases and provide relevant background on their professional qualifications, according to a complaint filed to the US District Court ...

The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee on Wednesday advanced five more bills to the Senate floor for discussion as part of a series of 19 companion bills to the mammoth House-passed 21st Century Cures bill. Wednesday marked the third and final hearing by the committee, which is still grappling with a fight over $50 billion in additional mandatory funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that’s supported by Senate Democrats. “With its 21st C...

More than 35 medical professors and experts have criticized the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) review of a Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) drug, citing errors in the agency’s advisory committee meeting briefing documents. At issue is Sarepta’s drug eteplirsen, which the company is seeking approval as the world’s first treatment for DMD, a rare and fatal genetic disorder afflicting about 15,000 boys in the US. The drug was initially supposed to go before the Pe...

The Senate’s Special Committee on Aging held its second hearing on pharmaceutical pricing on Thursday, this time taking shots at executives of Martin Shkreli’s former company Turing Pharmaceuticals, which only exists because of a monopoly and 5,000% price hike on a toxoplasmosis drug first approved more than 50 years ago. The first panel of witnesses included a couple whose newborn was diagnosed with toxoplasmosis but after their insurers denied coverage for the drug, kn...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to create two new databases that will allow it to look at safety and manufacturing information across multiple applications for products within a promising class of cancer immunotherapies called anti-CD19 CAR modified T-cells. FDA officials presented their proposal to pilot the databases last week during a meeting of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), which is organized by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH...

Three new expert committee meetings on opioids were announced by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week as two Democratic senators continue to oppose Robert Califf’s nomination as the next FDA commissioner ahead of a Senate vote on Monday. Before that vote, Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) said they will hold a press conference to discuss why they’re opposed to Califf’s nomination. Markey has previously taken issue with FDA’s  approval of the us...

A number of drugmakers are calling on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be more flexible with sponsors in developing guidance on safety assessments for investigational new drug (IND) applications, according to comments published Wednesday on the draft document. The draft guidance from December calls on sponsors to create a safety assessment committee (SAC) to review safety information in a clinical development program and make recommendations to the sponsor ...

The US Food and Drug Administration’s Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee (CTGTAC) met Tuesday to discuss updates of research programs in the Office of Cellular, Tissue and Gene Therapy (CTGT), which is part of FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). The research updates came as Raj Puri, MD, PhD, Director, Division of Cellular, and Gene Therapies (DCGT) at CBER told the committee that although his division has only licensed 12 prod...