Ophthalmic products are regulated under quality standards published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), United States Pharmacopeia (USP), and various US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guidance. Application of these standards has recently been affected by the legal requirement for the FDA to standardize the regulatory approach to ophthalmic products whose components are considered devices. The agency communicated the update through a guidance outlining the phase-i...

A US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety communication was escalated to a Class I recall for Alcon’s CyPass micro-stent systems over risk of eye damage in implanted patients.   FDA’s safety communication was issued last month based on a preliminary review of five-year post-surgery data from the COMPASS-XT study conducted by Alcon, the eye care division of Novartis. A second FDA safety alert involving the CyPass device was issued Wednesday in conjunction w...

The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) launched a new voluntary 510(k) pilot program to develop and refine individual premarket testing recommendations for ophthalmic optical coherence tomography (OCT) devices.   Under the pilot program, the individual premarket testing recommendations CDRH staff will seek to refine in collaboration with participating manufacturers are aimed at enabling greater consistency in 510(k) s...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday revised its draft bioequivalence (BE) guidance detailing the agency's expectations for generic versions of Durezol (difluprednate ophthalmic emulsion) in response to a citizen petition from Alcon and its parent company Novartis. In 2008, FDA approved Sirion Therapeutics' Durezol, a corticosteroid, to treat inflammation and pain associated with ocular surgery. Two years later, Alcon acquired the rights to Durezol from S...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning manufacturers of intraocular ophthalmic devices that they must do more to reduce the risk of their devices being contaminated with the endotoxins which cause Toxic Anterior Segment Syndrome (TASS) outbreaks. The warning came in the form of a new draft guidance document, Endotoxin Testing Recommendations for Single-Use Intraocular Ophthalmic Devices , released on 17 April 2014. The guidance notes that national outbr...