GPhA filed a Citizens Petition on September 19, asking FDA to implement its INN naming policy equally to all biologics, and, in the Petition, articulated all the arguments as to why this is a necessity for future biosimilars being approved by FDA.
IntelGenx Corporation of Saint Laurent, Quebec, Canada submitted petition FDA-2013-P-1058 (here) on August 22, 2013, asking the FDA to designate its Rizatriptan Oral Film product as AB rated (or therapeutically equivalent [TE]) when approved to Maxalt-MLT Orally Disintegrating Tablets, the reference listed drug (RLD) cited in its 505(b)(2) application. The fact that the two products might perform similarly does not overcome the fact that the products are different dosage forms.
Since December 22, 2007, the Dietary Supplement and Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act has required that serious adverse event information be reported to FDA for dietary supplements and OTC drugs not approved through a new drug application. There are many questions that can come up as soon as you dig a little deeper into what is required. Some answers will be provided here, but these are meant only to call attention to the potential complexity and depth of these requirements.
Today, the FDA released Revision 1 to the Draft Guidance to Industry: Generic Drug User Fee Amendment of 2012: Questions and Answers. This 36 page document contains additional questions and answers (as well as clarifications) to some of the issues raised in the original draft guidance issued on August 22, 2012.
The FDA has announced on the Federal Register (FR) prepublication page the availability (tomorrow) and publication of two documents that will be of significant interest to the industry.
Today the FDA issued the long awaited Guidance to Industry: ANDAs Stability of Drug Substances and Drug Products in draft answering questions the public submitted relative to the final ANDA stability guidance document issued September 25, 2012.
Ever since the meningitis outbreak associated with the products from the New England Compounding Center, the FDA and the States have been taking a closer look at this segment of the industry. So far, in 2013 alone, the FDA has issued 51 Safety Alerts for Human Medical Products, of which 17 (33%) related to sterile pharmacy compounded products and/or laboratories that tested those products for sterility and/or potency. In addition, FDA has taken 54 separate actions against compounding pharmacies in 2013 alone, with only 24 actions taken in the previous 5 years.
On August 20, 2013, FDA and the EMA (European Medicines Agency) published a document entitled, “EMA-FDA pilot program for parallel assessment of Quality-by-Design applications: Lessons learnt and Q&A resulting from the first parallel assessment.” The Q&A document provides information regarding agreements that were made between the agencies as a result of the first FDA-EMA parallel […]
Collecting information about mean and median approval times for abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs) is very difficult, time consuming and frustrating. We looked at the 31 approvals in June 2013 to see how the Office of Generic Drugs (OGD) was doing.
Yesterday, the FDA released an update to its 2007 Questions and Answers document on Medical Foods. Interestingly, it is the new information in this document that has us scratching our heads about the implications of this revised draft document.
