With just eleven of the twenty-two working days left in July for the OGD to report approval actions, the number of full approval actions stands at twenty-nine and tentative approval actions sit at eight, for a total of thirty-seven so far this month. These numbers are derived from the FDA’s All Approvals page here.
In two separate Federal Register (FR) notices today, the FDA announced a public hearing (here) to be held on September 17, 2019. The notice states:
This public hearing is intended to receive stakeholder input on the approval process for new opioids and how FDA might best consider the existing armamentarium of therapies,
The cat is out of the bag and so are CBD and other cannabis products. You can find CBD in almost anything (creams, ointments, lotions, foods, supplements) and almost everywhere, including gas stations, 7-Elevens, supermarkets, flea markets, and fairs, etc. I am certain that Amazon drones will be dropping it off at your front door soon.
Having lived through the days at FDA when sponsors called the FDA asking if anyone had submitted a Paragraph IV patent challenge for a specific drug and was thus potentially eligible for 180-day exclusivity as being a first-to-file applicant, the move to the PIV database was a godsend as it took the pressure off us FDAers having to skirt the answers to these inquiries for fear of providing confidential information about an ANDA submission.
It seems that FDA is updating its First Generic Approvals list a bit more frequently. As reported on May 17 (here) the number of First generic Approvals was 43 (please read that post for the definition of first generic approval and other interesting information about the report).
Yesterday the FDA updated its list through May 31,
In today’s prepublication of the Federal Register Notice entitled Fixed-Quantity Unit-of-Use Blister Packaging for Certain Immediate-Release Opioid Analgesics for Treatment of Acute Pain (here), the Agency is opening a docket to receive comments on a requirement to blister package certain commonly prescribed opioid products in an effort to reduce the potential for over dispensing quantities of opioid products to be more consistent with historical patient need.
This is a song I have sung in my house for 48 years on June 11th but now I finally get some help from the federal government! The story was all over the news this week about how Americans waste a ton of money disposing of perfectly good food because of an arbitrary date. A date that even the industry says is confusing.
The list, published by the Office of Management and Budget, outlines a host of proposed and/or final rules the FDA “hopes” to publish, or at least consider, in 2019. Given the state of and the bent towards new or additional regulations in the current administration, this seems like an ambitious agenda for the Agency.
The full list can be found here (the FDA is included in the full Health and Human Services list).
The issue of the use of biosimilars and their uptake in the market has been a discussion point since the first biosimilar was approved in 2015. Today, the FDA issued a long-awaited guidance on how a firm can demonstrate interchangeability of a biosimilar to its reference licensed product. The guidance is titled Considerations in Demonstrating Interchangeability With a Reference Product (which is a bit confusing as it applies only to biosimilars) and can be found here.
Today, FDA finalized a guidance document (initially issued in draft in October 2017)that discusses how to best determine if your proposed product should be submitted as an ANDA (505(j)) or an NDA (505(b)(2)). We first blogged about this here. The selection of the type of application to submit has been a source of discussion ever since the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984 created the 505(b)(2) process,
So far this FY, total approval actions (note that we are no longer saying approvals) have topped 100 each and every month, from a high of 132 (note that that figure was originally reported as 128, before FDA implemented its revised approval action counting reporting method (see previous post here). While the official April numbers are not out yet,
Publishing tomorrow, the FDA will announce that 28 ingredients that were considered in the June 30, 2016 proposed rule were given the boot while further consideration of three ingredients (benzalkonium chloride, alcohol (also referred to as ethanol or ethyl alcohol), and isopropyl alcohol) were deferred until the firms had more time to conduct appropriate studies and the Agency has time to review the additional information to be submitted.
This morning the FDA released a guidance document entitled Pediatric Information Incorporated Into Human Prescription Drug and Biological Product Labeling (here) which provides direction to firms that are developing labeling for pediatric patients based on findings of required or literature studies or data that are either positive, negative or inconclusive.
Coauthored by Kurt Karst (of FDA Law Blog) and Bob Pollock
The “Petitioned ANDA”—It’s a route to ANDA approval that’s been around since even before the enactment of the 1984 Hatch-Waxman Amendments. For several years after the enactment of Hatch‑Waxman, the petitioned ANDA was a mainstay of the generic drug industry’s drug development paradigm.
On March 12, 2019, the FDA approved an ANDA for Valsartan “to help relieve the recent shortage of this critical medicine as a result of multiple recalls of generic valsartan products from several manufacturers due to the finding that certain lots of Valsartan and other ARB medicines contain nitrosamine impurities.” The Agency prioritized the ANDA’s approval but is it not yet clear how quickly the FDA approved the ANDA or when it was submitted as it is not yet listed on the approval site or in the Orange Book.
