FDA
The FDA is mired in uncertainty with some staffers losing their jobs over the weekend and more potentially to come, vaccines and psychedelic therapies could be facing very different futures under newly confirmed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Moderna continues its downward revenue slide and Merck, Regeneron, BMS and more face strong patent headwinds.
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The upheaval of the Health and Human Services workforce and leadership leaves much to be desired in terms of delivery, recently retired FDA Chief Information Officer Vid Desai tells BioSpace, but the regulatory agency is evolving to be more open to much needed change.
While the FDA continues to put out guidance documents and approve drugs, some companies are already reporting delays in dealings with the agency, while insiders warn of falling morale and a negative perception from the rest of the biopharma world.
Executives from Eli Lilly, Merck and other companies foresee the FDA’s new onshoring proposal being anything from a bureaucratic waste of time to a transformative program that will eliminate inspection-related complete response letters.
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The regulator on Thursday said the mRNA vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax, will better protect against currently circulating variants as COVID continues to surge in many parts of the U.S.
The Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee in a Sept. 26 meeting will discuss whether the regulator should restrict approval of checkpoint inhibitors based on PD-L1 expression levels.
The regulator’s Complete Response Letter flagged problems at a third-party fill/finish site, which Regeneron says it has already addressed. The manufacturing facility is currently awaiting reinspection.
Johnson & Johnson announced Tuesday that the FDA has approved Rybrevant with Lazcluze as a first-line chemotherapy-free treatment for patients with EGFR-mutated non-small cell lung cancer.
In June, the regulator placed a partial clinical hold on a Phase I trial of the companies’ antibody-drug conjugate after three patient deaths were reported.
The FDA on Monday only granted Liquidia’s Yutrepia tentative approval, keeping it off the U.S. market until after rival United Therapeutics’ exclusivity expires in May 2025.
Psychedelic drug developers are undeterred by the FDA’s Complete Response Letter for the company’s MDMA therapy for PTSD, and experts expect Lykos will ultimately obtain approval.
Imfinzi’s perioperative approval comes after both the FDA’s staffers and a panel of external experts expressed concerns about overtreatment when using the PD-L1 blocker both before and after surgery.
The regulator’s approval of Livdelzi for primary biliary cholangitis under the accelerated pathway is a boost to Gilead Sciences’ liver disease business. Analysts expect the drug to reach more than $1 billion in sales.
Nearly two weeks ahead of its target action date, the regulator on Wednesday has signed off on Incyte and Syndax’s Niktimvo for the third-line treatment of graft-versus-host disease.