An article in STAT (here) (paid subscription required), authored by a former FDAer, Jane Axelrad, should be read by all in the pharmaceutical industry. Axelrad notes that, while online access to current prescribing information has been available for over fifteen years, progress in eliminating the requirement to provide paper labels has been stymied by paper […]
Yesterday, the FDA issued a long-awaited guidance titled Remote Interactive Evaluations of Drug Manufacturing and Bioresearch Monitoring Facilities During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (here). The guidance notes that the Agency will determine whether remote inspections will occur and which tools are appropriate as alternatives to on-site inspections but indicates that it will not accept […]
Ricki A. Chase, M.S, Lachman Consultants, wrote a recent article for Contract Pharma looking at the benefits and challenges of the trend towards combination products. Here is a brief excerpt from the article: “As the life sciences industries have continued to evolve, the need for ever changing nomenclature has evolved along with it. It was […]
A Federal Register notice published on March 26, 2021 announced the Over-the-Counter (OTC) Monograph User Fee rates for the Agency’s newest UFA, OMUFA, 2021. There are two types of user fees; one is for facilities of firms that manufacture and distribute OTC products (monograph drug facilities (MDFs)) and the other is for a subset of […]
Once an approved NDA product is discontinued from marketing or withdrawn, the FDA must make a determination that the reason for such action by the innovator was not for safety or efficacy reasons (see 21 CFR 314.161(a)). Such a determination must be made before an ANDA for a duplicate of the reference listed drug (RLD) […]
As we all know, the pandemic has wreaked havoc with inspections of drug manufacturers, API manufacturers, and laboratory facilities, as well as inspection of clinical study sites. Remote working, meeting problems, and just general pandemic fatigue has hindered some of the FDA’s work. However, the statistics are not as bad as one might think, all […]
For those of you that are not directly in the pharmaceutical industry or who are not healthcare providers, you may wonder why the FDA is having a meeting to discuss the morphine milligram equivalents for other opioids. Well, I know that measure gives healthcare providers a good idea of how to transition patients taking morphine […]
With the number of emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for drugs, devices, and biologics numbering in the hundreds and the relaxed enforcement policy on certain OTC products, the Agency will have a lot to do once the pandemic is over. FDA will need to decide whether to grant final clearance or approval to a ton of […]
I must admit that the explosion in the CBD market surprised me. The Warning Letters have also been flying off of the computers at FDA with most addressing drug claims for such products. Maybe I have not seen this before in a Warning Letter, but the argument made in recent FDA Warning Letters regarding CBD […]
The unofficial approval-action numbers for ANDAs improved a bit from last month’s seventy, with the OGD hitting a total of full- and tentative-approval actions of seventy-eight. This breaks down to seventy‑two full-approval actions and six tentative-approval actions. These numbers are as of the morning of March 5, 2021 from the FDA’s All Approvals list (here). […]
