As part of a push to more quickly offer patients access to innovative treatments, France’s drug regulator, known as ANSM, has established two “Fast Track” options that will expedite the authorization of clinical trials. Unlike the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Fast Track process, which is designed to expedite the review of drugs to treat serious conditions and fill an unmet medical need, France’s new designation concerns clinical trials of innovative treatment...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is increasingly granting faster reviews via expedited regulatory pathways, but a new article published in the British Medical Journal found a higher association with these expedited pathways and the likelihood of safety-related labeling changes than with non-expedited pathways. In their analysis of 15 years of data, authors Sana Mostaghim, Joshua Gagne and Aaron Kesselheim of the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law...

A recent study in Health Affairs suggests that drugs given an expedited review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) offer greater health gains than drugs that receiving a conventional review. But experts caution that the study might only show incremental benefits. The study, conducted by Peter Neumann, director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health and three of his colleagues at Tufts Medical Center, compared the change in quality-adjuste...

In its annual report released Tuesday, Swiss drug regulator Swissmedic says it outpaced the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in approving new drugs in 2016, in part due to the agency's new fast-track procedure. In 2016, Swissmedic approved 42 new active substances (NASs), a 50% increase over the previous year and just over 50% more than EMA recommended. "This increase shows that the pharmaceutical industry in Switzerland is conti...

Welcome to our Asia Regulatory Roundup, our weekly overview of the top regulatory news in Asia. India Offers Fast-Track Approvals to HIV, Hepatitis Combination Products The Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) is offering fast-track approvals to combination products to treat HIV and hepatitis B and C. DCGI Dr GN Singh is prepared to waive the need to run clinical trials and truncate the regulatory submission process to cut the time it takes for sponsors to br...

This article discusses the development of a regulatory strategy allowing companies to identify opportunities and problems prospectively, improve utilization of company resources and focus the development team on the key objectives and assist in developing products with a positive benefit-risk profile demonstrating differential advantages and value for prescribers and payers. The term "strategy," per Merriam Webster (Edition 11), means "a careful plan or method for achi...

The European Medicines Agency’s (EMA) Executive Director Guido Rasi and senior medical officer Hans-Georg Eichler sent a letter on Thursday to clarify some assumptions called into question by a group of nine professors who are criticizing aspects of the agency’s adaptive pathways pilot program. Background First announced in March 2014, EMA’s pilot program seeks to accelerate patient access to drugs for patients with pressing medical needs and after approval for a narrow...

Welcome to our Asia Regulatory Roundup, our weekly overview of the top regulatory news in Asia. China Proposes Drug Approval Reforms to Encourage Innovation Senior Chinese officials are considering adopting legislation that would overhaul the drug evaluation and approval process in the country to encourage innovation by incentivizing research. As it stands, only manufacturers can apply for drug approvals in China. Officials are now considering whether this disincen...

An increasing number of newly-approved drugs by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been associated with expedited development or review programs, though many of these approved drugs are not first in class and potentially less innovative, according to two new studies published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). Background Under the standard regulatory review process, FDA has 10 months to review a potential new drug's safety and efficacy based on a company'...

Last year, a study by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MIPR) found variations in review time at the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) various drug review divisions were caused by inefficiencies at the agency. Now, FDA representatives are making the case that the variation in review times can be explained by the proportion of applications receiving accelerated review in different therapeutic areas. The MIPR study concluded that the variations in rev...

In recent years, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has made great advances in the review of new drugs. The US now is reported to lead the world in both timeliness and quantity of noteworthy new drug approvals. 1 This trend is due in part to FDA’s ongoing commitment to improve the drug development process and establish robust, efficient and predictable development programs. As a result, products demonstrating a positive benefit-risk profile and appropriate e...

For some serious or life-threatening diseases, few therapeutic options exist. Once a promising therapy is discovered, establishing its clinical benefit and safety profile is necessary but can be time consuming. Standard drug development programs involve formulating and manufacturing the drug product, characterizing the new drug, gathering adequate evidence on its performance, evaluating the safety risks and confirming the effects observed in the early clinical trial...