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.
Regulatory snapshots, including global drug submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Altamira, Astrazeneca, Bharat, Biohaven, Depymed, Eiger, Greenwich, Immunitybio, Immunogen, Nymox, Ocugen, Regeneron, Salubris, Sanofi, Therapeuticsmd.
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.
Although it was recently overturned in a legal challenge, a short-lived California state law mandating gender quotas for corporate boards may have made a few drug and device companies based in the state think twice about the makeup of their boards.
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.
The U.S. FDA sent a refuse to file letter to Nymox Pharmaceutical Corp. regarding its NDA for fexapotide triflutate, a pro-apoptotic protein intended for treating benign prostatic hyperplasia. The letter noted that more long-term safety data was needed for the application, the company said.
Singapore’s Health Sciences Authority (HSA) recently updated its guidelines for software as medical devices (SaMDs) to broaden its scope on a number of related matters. The new guidelines were finalized after an industry input period when the HSA collected feedback until the middle of August 2021. It marks the second revision of HSA guidelines on SaMDs, the first revision was meted out in April 2020.
Regulatory snapshots, including global submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Anika, Nanomix, Trinity Biotech.
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.
In the wake of a patient’s death, the U.S. FDA has placed a partial clinical hold on Foghorn Therapeutics Inc.’s phase I study of FHD-286 in treating relapsed and/or refractory acute myelogenous leukemia (r/r AML) and myelodysplastic syndrome.
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