The US Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee is in the early stages of launching its own legislative process intended to help reform the ways in which the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates drugs and medical devices, it has announced. Background The effort, announced on 29 January 2014, is being led by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Richard Burr (R-NC), and is meant to complement similar efforts by the House Energy and Commerce ...

Earlier this week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of an ambitious new bill, the 21st Century Cures Act . The legislation, if enacted, would radically alter the way in which drugs and devices are regulated in the US. Within the 393-page legislation are dozens and dozens of proposals, large and small. But which ones are especially worth paying attention to? We're glad you asked. What follows is our analysis of which proposals are likely to attrac...

If a new bill introduced in Congress this week is ultimately passed, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) might soon need to change its 85-year-old name—and give up all of its authority to regulate food, including dietary supplements. The bill, known as the Safe Food Act of 2015 , is set to strip several regulatory bodies of their authority to regulate food products and transfer that authority to a new regulator, the Food Safety Administration (FSA), whose sole j...

The US House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee today released a long-anticipated discussion draft of its 21st Century Cures Act , an ambitious attempt to overhaul the way the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates new healthcare products in the hopes of incentivizing the creation of new products to treat patients. The 393-page draft contains five main sections, as well as dozens of subtitles: Title I—Putting Patients First By Incorpora...

New legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives last week seeks to incentivize the development of new combination drugs by redefining what a "new" drug really is. Background Under existing rules administered by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), not all new drug products are treated the same. New chemical entities (NCEs) that have never before been approved in the US for any indication are eligible for five years of marketing exclusivity, during wh...

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has unveiled plans to introduce new legislation she says will require pharmaceutical companies found guilty of regulatory and legal non-compliance to pay large fines, all in the hopes of providing a new funding stream to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Premise: Big Profits Come From Government In a speech at a healthcare conference on 22 January 2015, Warren—a populist Democrat whose meteoric rise to popularity has left some ...

The House of Representatives is in the advanced stages of considering legislation that could make it easier for some drug products to reach the market after being approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Background In a notice posted to the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee's website on 20 January 2015, Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) said he will hold a meeting on 27 January 2015 to consider several pieces of legislation, including the Improving Regulat...

For months, legislators on the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee have been working with a large group of stakeholders in the hopes of developing a series of reforms to the way the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves new drugs and medical devices. Now the committee has reached out in the hopes of recruiting one especially important stakeholder to its cause: President Barack Obama. Background The legislative effort, known at the 21st Century Cures Init...

A new bill introduced in the House of Representatives by a prominent Republican legislator would make it easier for companies to distribute investigational medical devices explicitly labeled as being "for research use only (RUO)." The Medical Testing Availability Act of 2015 , sponsored by Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX), the vice chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Health, is similar to an identically titled bill introduced by Burgess in 2013 ....

New legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives just prior to the holiday break would amend the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) to increase penalties on the sale or trade of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and also grant the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new authority to recall drugs. Counterfeit Bill Proposed The proposed legislation, The Counterfeit Drug Enforcement Act of 2014 , was introduced on 11 December 2014 by Rep. Steve Is...

President Barack Obama has signed a new bill into law allowing any pharmaceutical or biotechnology company that successfully develops a product to treat the Ebola virus to obtain a special voucher potentially worth millions—and even billions—of dollars. The law, Adding Ebola to the FDA Priority Review Voucher Program Act , was signed into law by Obama on 16 December 2013. The law focuses on FDA's neglected tropical disease priority review voucher (PRV) program, a pro...

New legislation set to be signed into law by US President Barack Obama would ban dozens of active ingredients now used in the production of anabolic steroids, and also make it easier for federal authorities to prohibit the production of similar products. Background The legislation, the Designer Anabolic Steroid Control Act (DASCA) of 2014, was passed by the US House of Representatives on 15 September 2014, and the US Senate on 11 December 2014. According to its spo...