The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the paradox surrounding the inclusion of pregnant and breastfeeding women in medical research. Even when these women are at higher risk for severe illness and hospitalization, they are unlikely to be included in clinical trials for medical products and vaccines. In a recent article, officials at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signaled their commitment to work with industry and other regulators to support the inclus...

In the wake of the systemic changes flowing from the UK’s exit from the EU, the country’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) plans to streamline review of clinical trials for medicinal products.   Beginning in January 2022, new Clinical Trials of Investigational Medicinal Products (CTIMPs) will receive a combined review from MHRA and the UK Research Ethics Services, with collaboration from the UK’s Health Research Authority (HRA). The process is...

New drug shortages in the US decreased in 2020, in part because of the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) use of enforcement discretion to ensure an uninterrupted supply of critical medical products during the COVID-19 public health crisis.   Yet, the agency’s new drug shortages report to Congress said that while these actions helped avert shortages in the short-term, more work is needed to improve supply chain resiliency.   This report summarizes the agency...

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) on Thursday opened a public consultation on the International Council for Harmonisation’s (ICH) S12 guideline on nonclinical biodistribution (BD) considerations for gene therapies.   The S12 guideline recently reached Step 2b of the ICH process after being endorsed at the ICH Assembly virtual meeting earlier this month. (RELATED: ICH reports ‘significant milestones’ reached on guidelines ranging from impurity testing to eCTD standa...

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) started 2020 by wrapping up challenges associated with the UK’s decision to leave the EU, only to run headlong into additional challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the annual report that also marked the agency’s 25 th anniversary, EMA outlined a year that looked different than most.   “As the scientific body in charge of the regulation of medicines, EMA had an essential part to play in ensuring treatments and vaccines ...

Ireland’s Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) has published its strategic plan for 2021 to 2025. HPRA set out five goals intended to help it emerge from the “twin challenges of Brexit and COVID-19” and deliver better outcomes for people and animals.   The five goals are titled health system partnerships, progressive regulation, communication and engagement, enabling innovation and great people, great processes. By engaging in activities that further those goals...

This article provides an introduction to artificial intelligence (AI), its characteristics, and how those characteristics affect regulatory compliance. It also examines efforts to regulate the ethical aspects of AI in the EU, future legislative initiatives that may affect AI in medical devices, and the crucial role standards play in supporting legislation.*   Introduction Although different people may understand artificial intelligence (AI) differently, it has been...

Top regulators from the US, EU, UK and Japan view harmonization as a critical factor in enabling the development of advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs) for ultra-rare diseases.   Particularly for cell and gene therapies targeting patient populations numbering in the hundreds worldwide, commercial viability and the feasibility of clinical trials can be complicated by jurisdictional differences in regulatory requirements. Such challenges were the topic of convers...

Welcome to Regulatory Reconnaissance, your daily regulatory news and intelligence briefing.   In Focus: US Novartis' canakinumab failed to improve survival in Phase III trial ( Reuters ) ( Endpoints ) Is a leaderless FDA clamping down on drug reviews? Not knowing is weighing heavy on biotech ( STAT ) Pandemic Forces FDA to Sharply Curtail Drug Company Inspections ( NYT ) A Survey of Survival Outcomes for Targeted Cancer Drugs Approved by the US Food and Drug Admini...

MSD's (Merck Sharp & Dohme (UK) Limited) investigational drug belzutifan on Friday became the first drug to be awarded an “innovation passport” under the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) innovative licensing and access pathway (ILAP).   Belzutifan is being developed to treat adults with von Hippel-Lindau disease, a rare cancer-causing genetic disorder, and has been granted orphan designation in the EU and both orphan designation and br...

Regulatory and health technology assessment agencies in Canada and England are diverging from the US when it comes to oncology drugs. But they often rely on the same surrogate endpoints to make their decisions, according to two new analyses published in JAMA Internal Medicine .   The first study , led by Avi Cherla, MSc, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, revealed that among 68 cancer indications with accelerated approval in the US that also rec...

Regulators in Europe are beginning to give safety readouts from global experiences with vaccines against COVID-19, while the United Kingdom has issued a report delineating its multi-pronged safety surveillance approach.   The European Medicines Agency’s safety committee met at the end of January to review data from clinical use of the COVID-19 messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine co-developed by Moderna and the US National Institutes of Health.   Following a 28 January mee...