A new drug development model released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates a Medicare drug pricing bill like the one proposed by Democrats in the US House of Representatives could result in between 21 and 59 fewer drugs brought to market over the next three decades.   The Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act ( H.R. 3 ), introduced in the 116th Congress during the 2019-2020 legislative session, would require the Secretary of Health and Human Servi...

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...

In its first warning letter of the year, the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) last week cited AcelRx Pharmaceuticals over promotional materials for its opioid analgesic Dsuvia (sufentanil sublingual tablet).   Specifically, the warning letter cites the company for false and misleading claims made in banner ads and a tabletop display that feature a tagline promoting the ease of administration of Dsuvia as “Tongue a...

Feature articles during January focused the effects of disruption on global regulatory practice. In context of the COVID-19 pandemic, authors examined expedited approval pathways for test kits in southeast Asian countries; the role of digital promotional strategies in minimizing the impact of the pandemic on advertising, promotion, and labeling; and the importance of continuing soft-skills training during remote working. Under the broader framework of disruption, a group o...

December 2020. It’s been just one year since we finished the last Regulatory Focus issue on advertising and labeling, yet it feels like a lifetime. In March, as the true impact of COVID-19 kicked in and we retreated from the office space to our home offices, it was hard to envision how we would prevail, both personally and professionally. But our industry, and particularly regulatory advertising and labeling, did not skip a beat and instead, stayed the course and perseve...

This article provides the sponsor’s perspective and best practices on facilitating electronic common technical document (eCTD) submissions for promotional materials as a shared learning for other companies.   Introduction The long-awaited June 2019 guidance 1 on regulatory submissions in electronic and nonelectronic format marked the beginning of a two-year countdown for sponsors to submit promotional materials in eCTD format to the Office of Prescription Drug Pro...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday announced it will pilot a new program it hopes will spur the development of novel drug development tools (DDTs) that do not fit within the agency’s existing DDT qualification programs.   The qualification process for DDTs was revamped under the 21 st Century Cures Act and FDA currently offers specific qualification programs for biomarkers, clinical outcome assessments (COAs) and animal models for use under the Anim...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday announced it will not begin collecting drug manufacturing volume data next month as required by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act).   Section 3112 of the CARES Act establishes new reporting requirements for drug manufacturers intended to improve the response to drug shortages, including expanding shortage reporting requirements for life-saving drugs to include drugs that are “critical...

Feature articles during May focused on risk management and mitigation in dealing with contractors and vendors and included articles on best practices in good vendor management, use of risk management to support outsourcing activities, testing in-house versus outsourcing, and outsourcing in regulatory operations. Also included were in-depth examinations of challenges and opportunities in “bespoke” therapies, a critical appraisal of drug shortages in Germany and an update on...

This article discusses the advent of bespoke therapies, defined as the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics or symptoms and responses of a patient during all stages of care and as a new frontier beyond personalized medicine. The author covers the revolutionary genetic tools implementing such therapies and the clinical and nonclinical safety perspectives for bespoke therapies. The author concludes that with bespoke therapies we are entering a new...

This article discusses drug shortages in Germany, the root causes of production problems with active pharmaceutical ingredients, and drug product manufacturers. The authors offer analysis from the perspective of a medium-sized generic drug manufacturer. They outline a range of reasons for the shortages, all of which point to a “broken marketplace.” The authors conclude with a discussion of mitigation activities and address the current COVID-19 pandemic. They warn that drug...