‘Better informed patients,’ ‘drug competition,’ ‘biosimilar innovation’ – as well as nutrition and tobacco goals will be achieved through guidances, promotional plans and other items FDA will develop over the next year.
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Pink Sheet editors discuss the appointment of Vinay Prasad as the new director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research and revelations that FDA layoffs now are hindering development of guidance documents.
Agency staff once again have access to the Lexis-Nexis legal and news database, but are still waiting for access to journals, and laid off librarians have not been reinstated.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. regularly decries the “conflicts of interest” he believes abound in advisory committees, but his concerns, as well as a recent “policy directive” eliminating industry representatives, seem driven by a misunderstanding of the panels’ jobs.
Screening for conflicts and finding the right expertise for a two-day Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee meeting on four products has been complicated by the Trump Administration’s initial communications freeze and subsequent layoffs in CDER.
The European Medicines Agency is investigating whether Valneva’s Ixchiq is safe to use in the elderly, following reports of 17 serious adverse events, including two cases resulting in death, in people aged 62 to 89 years who received the vaccine. This follows actions by US and French authorities last month regarding Ixchiq’s use in people over 65.
The European Medicines Agency, like its counterpart in the US, is increasingly focusing on the use of alternatives to animal testing.
Industry is concerned that Prasad may make regulatory flexibility tougher to obtain for cell and gene therapy, while vaccine and public health advocates are angry about Prasad’s criticisms of US COVID-19 policies.
