The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is widely seen as a groundbreaking piece of legislative handiwork, but companies in the life sciences may see it as a groundbreaker with negative consequences. The latest edition of the AI Act continues to treat medical AI software as a high-risk product, which would make these products exceptionally expensive and burdensome to bring to market in the EU and convince some companies in the medical AI business to skip the European market altogether.
Regulatory snapshots, including global submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Belkin Vision, Cryofocus, Zimvie.
Nextpoint Therapeutics Inc. has received FDA clearance of its IND application for NPX-887, a fully human monoclonal antibody targeting HHLA2 (B7-H7), a novel immune checkpoint and tumor target antigen highly expressed in many cancers independently of PD-L1.
Vittoria Biotherapeutics Inc. has received FDA clearance of its IND application to initiate a first-in-human phase I trial with VIPER-101, a gene-edited, autologous, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory T-cell lymphoma.
Both Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Casgevy (exagamglogene autotemcel, exa-cel) and Bluebird Bio Inc.’s Lyfgenia (lovotibeglogene autotemcel, lovo-cel) received U.S. FDA approval Dec. 8, providing 16,000 American sickle cell patients who have recurring vaso-occlusive events with access to the first cell-based gene therapies.
After a nine-month review, the Biden administration is preparing to go where all other U.S. administrations have refused to trod. In releasing a draft framework to help federal agencies decide whether to exercise a federal march-in on patent rights protecting taxpayer-supported drugs and other inventions, including medical devices.
Biospectal SA has received a CE MDR class IIa medical device certification for its optical fingertip blood pressure monitoring app, Optibp. The device records fingertip blood flow optically and transforms the information into a pulse wave that it analyzes to estimate blood pressure.
The U.S. FDA’s draft rule for lab-developed tests (LDTs) has proven to be every bit as controversial as expected, although the controversy is only marginally about the workload that would come with rulemaking.