Feature articles during March focused on regulatory intelligence (RI), including first-hand accounts of setting up a dedicated process for RI monitoring and developing an in-house RI database, as well as an examination of the implications of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) new integrated review template for RI. Also included were articles on the importance a global unique device identification (UDI) system, the FDA’s Bad Ad program, and the importance of writ...

US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review summaries, previously referred to as summary basis of approval documents, can serve as invaluable sources of regulatory strategy information, the details of which are not publicly available from any other source. When the FDA announced its plans to use a more streamlined approach to communicating regulatory decisions through an integrated assessment process and review document, it raised concern among those who contribute to and...

A few ingredients are essential to advancing therapies for rare diseases: organized patients, the involvement of academic researchers, and support and flexibility from the US Food and Drug Administration and industry. That’s according to Frank McCormack, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Cincinnati. “It begins with the courage and resolve of patients. The patients had the foresight to organize, and facilitate and fund research, and then they lined up for tr...

A panel of experts at BIO Digital on Wednesday discussed some of the challenges and regulatory considerations for sponsors developing treatments for ultra-rare diseases where clinical trials could involve a very small number of patients.   When asked where companies should begin their development for extremely rare diseases, Brad Glasscock, global vice president and head of global regulatory affairs at BioMarin said, “First and foremost I think is understanding whether...

Since 2007, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a handful of special "priority review" vouchers (PRVs) which allow its recipient to expedite the review of any one of its new drug products. What are these vouchers, why is FDA issuing them and what benefit might they have for society? Find out in our latest Regulatory Explainer on the Priority Review Voucher system. Last updated on 25 February 2020 to include: Vifor Pharma said on 17 February that it p...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is taking notice of a unique and recent phenomenon where physicians and specialists can create a tailored treatment to help or even cure an individual patient with a rare genetic mutation that could prove fatal. In an editorial published Tuesday in the New England Journal of Medicine , Janet Woodcock, director of FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, and Peter Marks, director of the agency’s Center for Biologics Evalua...

After receiving 89 clinical trial grant applications, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday selected 12 projects that will be funded with more than $15 million over the next four years.   The announcement of the new funding comes as approximately 30 million Americans are affected by 7,000 known rare diseases, but only a few hundred treatments exist for these rare diseases.  Two-thirds of the 2019 grants will go to studies affiliated with universities,...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday released revised draft guidance on rare pediatric disease priority review vouchers (PRVs), which are awarded to companies developing certain rare pediatric disease treatments and can then be sold. From 2014 to today, FDA has issued 20 rare pediatric disease PRVs, with one selling for $350 million to AbbVie in 2015 and more recently selling for between $80 million and $130 million. The revisions to FDA’s guidance i...

To streamline decision-making in approval processes, three regulatory authorities joined four others Thursday in increasing their adoption of drug development consultancy Certara’s Phoenix platform. The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Agency (MHRA), Brazil’s National Health Surveillance Agency (ANVISA) and Japan’s Pharmaceuticals and Medical Device Agency (PMDA) are now licensing Certara’s Phoenix IVIVC toolkit for in vitro-in vivo correlation. The agencies wer...

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...

Trade associations representing the medical device and clinical research industries, as well as the nonprofit public advocacy organization Public Citizen, are calling for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to clarify provisions of its proposed rule for institutional review boards (IRBs) to waive or alter requirements for obtaining informed consent for certain clinical trials involving minimal risk to participants.   Background   Under current FDA regulations...

A consensus of industry participants at a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) webinar on Thursday pressed for metrics on the medical device priority review program run by FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH). The webinar led by Maureen Dreher, policy analyst at CDRH’s Office of Device Evaluation, underscored the need for additional transparency around the Breakthrough Device Program. This request was supported across several participants during the ...