By Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D.
Anniversaries are a time for stock-taking and today, on the second anniversary of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act or FDASIA, I’m pleased to report on the progress we’ve made implementing this multi-faceted law.
To date, we have completed nearly all of the deliverables we had scheduled for the first two years after FDASIA became law. And many of the new authorities under FDASIA are already having a positive impact on health. It’s difficult to cover all of our FDASIA work, but here are some highlights:
Preventing Drug Shortages: Drug shortages, which can have serious and immediate effects on patients and health care professionals, reached an all-time high in 2011, the year before FDASIA was enacted. In response to a Presidential Executive Order in December of that year, FDA issued an interim final rule to amend and broaden FDA regulations requiring certain manufacturers to give early notification of production interruptions that could cause drug shortages. FDASIA further broadened this requirement by requiring that other prescription drug manufacturers provide notification and also gave FDA additional authorities. In October 2013 FDA proposed a rule to implement these authorities and issued a strategic plan for addressing drug shortages. So far, with the help of early notifications, FDA was able to prevent 282 shortages in 2012 and 170 shortages in 2013. The number of drug shortages that did occur has also declined.
Promoting Innovation: FDASIA includes many provisions designed to encourage innovation. We have held meetings on the use of meta-analyses in drug applications; put in place a plan for implementing a benefit-risk framework for drug reviews, and issued a variety of guidance documents covering such topics as drug studies in children, abuse-deterrent drug development, antibacterial drug development and expedited review and development programs for serious diseases.
This latter guidance provided information that sponsors needed to know about our new Breakthrough Therapy designation that was part of FDASIA. This option exists for new drugs intended to treat a serious or life-threatening disease that, preliminary clinical evidence suggests, could provide a substantial improvement over available therapies. As of June 23, we had granted 52 requests for this designation, and of those, approved four new drugs and two new indications for previously approved drugs.
As part of our implementation of the FDASIA-related provisions related to medical devices, we proposed a strategy and recommendations for a risk-based health information technology (health IT) framework that would promote product innovation while maintaining appropriate patient protections and avoiding regulatory duplication; issued a proposed rule for implementing FDASIA’s streamlined new procedures for reclassifying a device; and published a final rule on a medical device unique identification or UDI with implementation in accordance with the timetable set in the law. UDIs will help the FDA identify product problems more quickly, better target recalls and improve patient safety. The riskiest medical devices will start bearing their UDI by September 24th.
Establishing and Strengthening User Fee Programs: An important element of FDASIA was reauthorizing user fees for prescription drugs and medical devices and creating new user fee programs for generic drugs and biosimilar biological drugs. User fees on some types of applications offer an important source of funding to support and maintain key activities, including FDA’s staff of experts who review the thousands of product submissions we receive every year. Since FDASIA took effect, review times for medical devices have been declining. Our prescription drug user fee program is meeting or exceeding almost all of our performance goals agreed to with industry. We have acted on 54 percent of the generic drug applications, or amendments and supplements to generic drug applications which were pending in our inventory as of October 1, 2012. This helps ensure that consumers can have access to more low-cost drugs. And we have been able to provide advice concerning most of the 93 submissions from companies who are developing biosimilar biological drugs under a pathway that could also ultimately lower costs for consumers.
Enhancing Patient Engagement: A hallmark of FDASIA was a series of provisions intended to tap the patient perspective. Our Patient-Focused Drug Development Program allows us to more systematically obtain the patient’s perspective on a disease and its impact on the patients’ daily lives, the types of treatment benefit that matter most to patients, and the adequacy of the available therapies for the disease. In accordance with FDASIA, we have held patient meetings on eight diseases and have plans for meetings on 12 more. We have learned a great deal from patients in terms of their views of the symptoms of their condition, their feelings about how it affects their life, and their thoughts on ideal treatments and on participation in clinical trials to aid future drug development. A FDA Voice blog post on patient reports captures these patient perspectives and much more.
Finally, Title VII of FDASIA provided FDA with numerous new authorities to protect the drug supply chain. We thought now was a good time to provide the public with a more detailed description of our work on Title VII, so we asked Howard Sklamberg, Deputy Commissioner for Global Regulatory Operations and Policy, to write a separate blog on that topic. Look for that post soon.
FDA laid out a three-year plan for implementing FDASIA and we’re on our way to achieving our stated goals. To help the public follow our progress, we set up a dedicated webpage—the FDASIA-Track. It provides useful links to each action and is updated on a regular basis.
Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., is Commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
– See more at: http://blogs.fda.gov/fdavoice/index.php/2014/07/fdasia-at-year-two/#sthash.ECiwD3Qv.dpuf
