Shanghai Heartcare Medical Technology Corp. Ltd. received marketing approvals for three medical devices designed for stroke, namely its left atrial appendage (LAA) occluder, the aspiration catheter, and the support catheter.
The Embold fibered detachable coil developed by Boston Scientific Corp. to obstruct or reduce the rate of blood flow during therapeutic treatment in the peripheral vasculature, has won U.S. FDA 510(k) clearance.
Wysa Ltd.’s artificial intelligence-based digital therapy received FDA breakthrough device designation for adults with chronic musculoskeletal pain, depression and anxiety. The device delivers cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) via a digital companion or conversational agent on a smartphone.
The commercial success of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines has other companies in the space “looking in the attic, so to speak,” to see if they have any patents they can assert against components of the vaccines so they can get a percentage of the sales, Aziz Burgy, a patent attorney, told BioWorld. Given the global spread of the pandemic and how quickly it came on, the vaccines have generated billions of dollars in sales in a short period of time, and other companies want a share, he said. He compared today’s patent infringement cases against the vaccine producers to the litigation seen in the early days of the smartphone revolution when other high-tech companies scrambled for a piece of Apple’s and Samsung’s profits.
In an effort to increase global access to COVID-19 technologies, the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool and the Medicines Patent Pool finalized a licensing agreement May 12 with the U.S. NIH for research tools, early stage vaccines and diagnostics.
Regulatory snapshots, including global submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Accelus, Cepheid, Medmira, Remedee Labs, Wysa.
Regulatory snapshots, including global drug submissions and approvals, clinical trial approvals and other regulatory decisions and designations: Amicus, Ascletis, Cue, Eli Lilly, Immuron, Incyte, Iterum, Kiromic, Regulus, Spine, Veru.
The legislation that would renew a number of FDA user fee programs, the Food and Drug Amendments Act (FDA Act) of 2022, has passed the first legislative hurdle in a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, but there are several issues with the bill. According to members of the subcommittee, the issues include an absence of provisions for medical device servicing, and the absence of legislation for FDA regulation of lab-developed tests (LDTs), issues that are unlikely to be resolved before the legislation is passed out of the House.
The FDA has greenlighted Neuronetics Inc.’s Neurostar transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system as an adjunct treatment for adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The noninvasive treatment, which uses repetitive, focused magnetic pulses to stimulate brain cells, is already cleared and marketed in the U.S., Japan and select other countries for major depressive disorder (MDD).
With its focus on transformative high-risk, high-reward research to drive biomedical breakthroughs, the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) may be a good concept, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of increased investment in basic research at the NIH, according to the bipartisan leadership of U.S. House appropriators.