Just look around, watch the television, read the newspaper, and what do you see? Seems like very few reasons to be thankful. School and workplace shootings, the political scene is as nasty as I ever remember in my 70 years on earth. Climate change is threatening the future of our children, and the environmental controls have been set back 50 years as the oceans continue to rise,
The GRx-Biosims 2019 meeting started off with a meditation and stretching exercise; after that, we had to put our minds to work and begin exercising out neurons. Anna Abram, Deputy Commissioner for Policy, Legislation, and International Affairs, provided an update on generic drug activity, action plans, and biosimilars. Key points and highlights were:
Oh, the games that are played to keep market share are becoming more curious every day. Just check out this article from Drug Topics penned by Louis Tharp and Craig Burton entitled Generics and Biosimilars Facing Formulary Difficulties (here). When Hatch-Waxman was passed, there were attacks on the bioequivalence of generic drugs,
California Separation Sciences Society (CaSSS) holds a two-day, highly interactive meeting with attendance from the biotechnology industry and global regulators each summer in the Washington, DC area (i.e., the CMC Strategy Forum). This year the title of the forum was “The Future of Post-Approval Changes is Coming – Are You Ready for ICH Q12?” and it focused on the draft International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) Q12 guideline (here) which addresses the technical and regulatory aspects of reporting post-approval changes to the regulatory bodies.
Now that we have passed the midpoint of 2019, it seemed like a good time to take a look at how the FDA and industry are doing at getting biotechnology product applications approved, and put this into historical perspective.
Between 1965 and the end of Federal Fiscal Year 2013, the FDA had approved approximately 86 therapeutic biopharmaceutical products (TBPs).
Section 7002(e)(4) of the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act of 2009 requires that on March 23, 2020, all New Drug Applications (NDAs) for biological products will be “deemed to be a license” under Section 351 of the Public Health Service Act (PHSA). In December of last year, the FDA published a final guidance as well as a Questions and Answers guidance regarding the complex logistics of this regulatory transition.
Today, in the Federal Register (here), the FDA announced a portion of its continuing modernization plan relative to better assessing its summary of approval that FDA prepares for all new NDA and BLA approvals. The notice asked for public comment on “the Clinical Data Summary Report Pilot program as part of the Agency’s continuous assessment of the efficiency and transparency of the clinical data used in the regulatory decision-making process.
On Friday May 10, the FDA published the much-anticipated final version of the guidance document Considerations in Demonstrating Interchangeability with a Reference Product. We did a general post here and, while recognizing the final version is similar (highly similar?) to the previous draft from January 2017, a careful review (as outlined here) found several useful and potentially significant changes in the final guidance.
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.
Well, for us old folks, change is always something that makes us queasy. The newly-designed FDA website stirred those feeling all over again as we try to navigate the new links and find the information that was once at our fingertips (or at least in our bookmarks). There were some wrong turns and some dead links along the way,
On Thursday, March 7, the FDA published a draft supplementary guidance on non-proprietary naming of biological products <here>, which updates the January 2017 Final Guidance on Nonproprietary Naming of Biological Products <here>. Both of these guidance documents address the FDA’s requirement for including a four-letter nonsense suffix in the proper name for biological products.
Day Two started with a recap of Day One (see post from yesterday here) by Dr. Nancy Snyderman.
Day Two kicked off with a session entitled Generics Help Patients, How Can Patients Help Generics. This centered on digital virtual prescribing, digital physician visits, and what’s going on in that space.
Each year, the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) publishes its report on generic drug savings (here). The data is based on the independent IQVIA organization’s findings. Some interesting findings in the forty-page report are outlined below:
