The U.S. FDA recently released a guidance for non-invasive remote monitoring devices, which were granted tremendous leniency during the COVID-19 pandemic as a means of reducing the demands on hospitals and doctor’s offices. That policy has been extended for the non-COVID era as part of the agency’s strategic plan to improve health equity by ensuring that access to digital health technologies is enjoyed by diverse American populations in a variety of health care access-challenged geographical areas.
Burning Rock Biotech Ltd. wants to significantly change the way cancers are detected and the biotech is sailing ahead with the latest breakthrough device designation received from China’s NMPA for its multi-cancer detection blood test (MCDBT), Overc.
The U.S. FDA, Health Canada, and the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency have once again sidestepped the usual mechanisms for international regulatory cooperation to strike a blow for harmonization.
The U.S. FDA’s draft rule for regulation of lab-developed tests (LDTs) carries an exceptionally ambitious timeline of completion and enactment by the time the next user fee agreement kicks in, and some see big problems with the timeline laid out by the agency. However, the FDA’s Elizabeth Hillebrenner said that Congress can tweak user fee legislation such that a specific set of user fee sources kicks in off schedule, thus giving the agency a little more leeway in completing any activity related to the proposed rule.
The FDA’s draft guidance for predetermined change control plans (PCCPs) is just that, a draft guidance, but that has not stopped the agency from incorporating the underlying concepts into existing guidances. An example of this is the September 2023 guidance for antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST) system for breakpoints in device labeling, a document that represents a jarring update to the legacy version published in 2009.
The U.S. FDA has finally let fly with a draft rule for regulation of lab-developed tests (LDTs), an 83-page document that delves into the legal controversies regarding whether the agency has the requisite statutory authority. However, Allyson Mullen, a director in the D.C. office of Hyman, Phelps & McNamara P.C., told BioWorld that the emergence of this draft rule doesn’t mean Congress won’t eventually be dragged back into the LDT fray, particularly if stakeholders litigate to overturn the draft.
The U.S. FDA may be the most prominent agency in the federal government when it comes to the use of real-world data (RWD), but the National Institutes of Health is keen to immerse itself in this trove of information. The agency has made a request for public comment on how NIH centers can best leverage RWD for biomedical and behavioral research, although some ethical and practical considerations may have to be overcome.
Patent challenges for radiotherapy equipment might not make the splash that in vitro diagnostic patents have, but Elekta AB and Zap Surgical Inc., have been locked in a dispute over an Elekta patent for the past four years.
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 covered a lot of budget terrain for the U.S. federal government, but Section 3305 was unusual for this type of bill in that it called on the FDA to require cybersecurity features as a part of the Quality System Regulation (QSR).
The U.S. FDA’s Accreditation Scheme for Conformity Assessment (ASCA) program is one of a number of efforts on the agency’s part to reduce the drag on premarket medical device submissions, but the agency has now converted the ASCA pilot into a full-blown regulatory program. Fortunately for both the FDA and industry, most of the guidance groundwork is already in place, making the ASCA program a ready-to-go method for streamlining at least one element of premarket applications for medical devices.
