With drug shortages becoming a fact of life during the pandemic, the U.K.’s Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is issuing two guidances to help ensure access to essential medicines in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, especially during shortages and public health emergencies.

Dermavant Sciences Inc. has received its first FDA approval with the agency’s blessing of Vtama (tapinarof) for treating plaque psoriasis in adults. The treatment is also the first FDA-approved, steroid-free topical medication in its class in addition to being the first psoriasis novel topical chemical entity introduced to the market in the past 25 years.

The U.S. FDA’s approval, in recent years, of new medicines that can fight certain drug-resistant bugs makes it possible to conduct noninferiority trials of potential antibacterial therapies in patients with infections caused by those bugs since active controls are now available.

Just in case the U.S. FDA didn’t get the message from its advisory committee about drug applications based solely on clinical trial data from China, a trio of U.S. lawmakers wrote to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf to voice their concerns about the “current ‘East to West’ movement of clinical data” to support the approval of me-too drugs.

Zhejiang Acea Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. failed to obtain marketing approval from China’s NMPA for its third-generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor, abivertinib. The NDA was based on a phase II trial of abivertinib in patients with EGFR Thr790Met point mutation-positive non-small-cell lung cancer with disease progression from prior EGFR inhibitors.

A year after the World Health Organization's (WHO) Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response called for reforms to make COVID-19 the last pandemic, the panel remains solidly frustrated in its lack of progress. The WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, emphatically agreed on May 18, saying he was taken aback by data showing COVID-19 cases rose in four out of the six WHO regions just in the past week.

Ethylene oxide (EtO) has been a mainstay in medical device sterilization for decades, but fears of carcinogenicity sparked protests outside EtO sterilization plants in Georgia and Illinois in 2018. While the COVID-19 pandemic overrode those concerns for two years, the FDA has opened a pilot program for conversion of sterilization methods that would require fewer regulatory filings than would otherwise be the case.