As the U.S. FDA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) move forward with new guidance and foundational data, they both recently issued requests for information (RFIs) to help them advance their agendas.
Even as U.S. lawmakers continue to push back against the rising price of prescription drugs and patients with life-threatening diseases clamor for access to new treatments, the FDA is considering a step that could increase the cost and lengthen the development time of therapies targeting non-small-cell lung cancer and perhaps other solid tumors.
The July 25 meeting of the U.S. FDA’s Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee (ODAC) could impact the future development of immune checkpoint inhibitors, such as Astrazeneca plc’s Imfinzi, to treat patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) both before and after surgery. Although much of the discussion will focus on an sBLA for Imfinzi (durvalumab), the committee will be asked to vote on whether the FDA should require that new trial design proposals for perioperative regimens for resectable NSCLC include adequate within-trial assessment of the contribution of the treatment phase to efficacy results.
Noting that the median list price of new drugs that entered the U.S. market last year hit $300,000, senior officials of the three biggest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) in the country once again denied responsibility for those prices as they testified before the House Oversight Committee July 23 in the third hearing the committee has held on PBM practices.
As the U.S. Congress continues to pass laws that require federal agencies to issue rules to implement new statutory provisions, a group of lawmakers is reminding the agencies that it will be looking over their shoulders to ensure they don’t stray beyond the scope of the law or overstep their authority.
The bill the U.S. Senate passed to prune biologic patent thickets could be among the first in a legislative thicket aimed at prescription drug prices to make it through the Senate before the year ends.
In denying Medicaid patients with sickle cell disease or transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia access to Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s fertility preservation program, which is intended to counteract a side effect of the company’s gene-editing therapy, Casgevy, “the federal government now stands as the barrier between thousands of predominantly Black Americans and the necessary medical care that would protect their basic right to have biological children,” Vertex said in a lawsuit filed July 15.
A bipartisan bill aimed at limiting patent thickets on biologics moved a step closer to law July 11 when the Senate passed it with unanimous consent in an unexpected vote that came more than one-and-a-half years after the Judiciary Committee reported it favorably to the Senate floor. The Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, S. 150, which would limit the type and number of patents that can be litigated under the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA), now awaits House action.
Just a day after the U.S. FTC released an interim report on harmful pharmacy benefit manager (PBM) practices and appeared before a House subcommittee that encouraged the commissioners to take enforcement action, the agency reportedly was preparing to file suit against the country’s three largest PBMs over their practices in negotiating insulin and other drug prices.
Having secured a 40% price cut and a commitment to not enforce a patent protecting a tuberculosis drug, South Africa’s Competition Commission decided not to prosecute a complaint accusing Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and its subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceutica (Pty) Ltd., of anticompetitive conduct.
