The demand for semaglutide, a GLP-1 drug, and other popular prescription weight-loss drugs is adding to the U.S. FDA’s regulatory load as more and more companies are offering unapproved knockoffs of the products directly to consumers. The FDA posted two warning letters Feb. 13 – to Miami-based US Chem Labs and a New-York company, Synthetix Inc. doing business as Helix Chemical Supply – citing the companies for misbranding unapproved semaglutide and tirzepatide, also a GLP-1 drug, by marketing them on the Internet, along with claims about their therapeutic benefits.
One down, eight to go. That’s the scorecard for the constitutional challenges to mandatory Medicare drug price negotiations now that a U.S. federal court has dismissed a suit filed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the National Infusion Center Association and the Global Colon Cancer Association.
Weaving in a loose regulatory end from March 2020 when it deemed nearly 100 NDAs as BLAs, the U.S. FDA released a final rule codifying its current approach to the use of drug master files for those products and their potential biosimilar competition.
The Feb. 8 U.S. drug pricing hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee started out as a spectacle in which Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) rehashed his usual talking points as he lectured the CEOs of Bristol Myers Squibb Co., Johnson & Johnson and Merck & Co. Inc. about how their companies charge so much more for their drugs in the U.S. than in other countries. But despite the show-trial aspects of the hearing, or what Ranking Member Bill Cassidy (R-La.) called Sanders’ ongoing “CEO-whack-a-mole” agenda, some facts came through that could lead to pricing reforms if Congress has the bipartisan will to do so.
Shadowed by prescription drug shortages at their highest level since 2014, the FDA issued a slightly revised version Feb. 6 of a draft guidance it released a year ago to give it more visibility into the U.S. drug supply chain.
When the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held its last hearing on the U.S. FDA’s foreign drug inspection program in December 2019, there were “reasons for cautious optimism,” subcommittee Chair Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) said in opening a Feb. 6 hearing on the issue. But in the wake of the pandemic, the optimism is gone.
Court rulings favoring biopharma companies that have challenged the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ efforts to force them to unconditionally offer 340B prescription drug discounts to an unlimited number of contract pharmacies could become moot in the future if a bipartisan draft bill becomes law.
In a historic first, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) sent out its opening offers Feb. 1 for the first round of prescription drug price negotiations.
Newly approved gene therapies targeting sickle cell disease will be the first focus of the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Cell and Gene Therapy Access Model, the agency said Jan. 30.