Third-party litigation funding has been a source of controversy in the U.S. over the past decade, but the practice drew little national scrutiny up to now.

The U.S. FDA’s device center disclosed its guidance ambitions for this new fiscal year – a list that includes the usual A and B lists for draft and final guidances. However, the agency now has an “under construction” list of guidance ambitions, the status of which is entirely reliant on the agency’s resources.

Edwards Lifesciences Corp. made a splash recently with the U.S. FDA approval of the Evoque tricuspid valve replacement device, but is also pressing Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to provide a coverage framework for this class of devices.

China’s National Medical Products Administration wrapped up a revision of its device classification procedures, providing entries into one of the world’s largest markets a mechanism for obtaining means for determining the risk of a novel device type.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office opted to allow the 2.0 pilot version of the After Final Consideration Program to expire, bringing to an end a program that ran for longer than a decade.

The controversy over conflicts of interest for Jeff Shuren, formerly the director of the U.S. FDA’s device center, reached Capitol Hill and may lead to an executive branch investigation into the matter.

The question of how to define artificial intelligence (AI) for medical product usage was answered by the FDA, which recently offered an AI glossary.

The U.S. FDA has guidances on the books for dental products, but the it unleashed a quartet of guidances – ceramics and cements used in dental procedure – for dental products on the final Friday of September 2024. The agency also issued a guidance without comment – unusual for the FDA – for the well-known, terror-striking pneumatic dental hand tool.

In some ways, remote patient monitoring (RPM) came of age during the COVID-19 pandemic, but payers still worry about the potential for fraud and abuse. A recent report from the U.S. Office of Inspector General supported concerns about fraud and abuse with RPM, a problem CMS will have to address to constrain unnecessary and potentially illicit spending.

The U.S. FDA’s inspection of two facilities run by San Francisco-based Irhythm Technologies Inc., illuminated some of the usual problems with corrective and preventive action. The agency indicated that problems with skin irritation associated with the company’s Zio device should have been handled as medical device reports, a view the company apparently did not share.