The Prescription Drug User Fee Act: Much More Than User Fees

Regulating Laboratory Tests: What Framework Would Best Support Safety and Validity?

Policy Points With increasing public attention to cases of inaccurate and misleading laboratory-developed tests, there have been calls for regulatory reform. To protect patients from faulty laboratory tests, we need a framework that balances comprehensive test review with laboratory flexibility. The Verifying Accurate Leading-edge IVCT [In Vitro Clinical Test] Development (VALID) Act would have helped ensure laboratory test safety and validity through a much-needed expansion of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight. However, Congress did not pass the VALID Act in 2022, forcing the FDA to start the regulatory reform process on its own.

Great Trees Require Strong Roots: Evaluating Data and Delegation Doctrine Underlying Proposed Reforms to FDA's Accelerated Approval Program

In "Missing the Forest for the Trees: Aduhelm, Accelerated Approvals & the Agency," Dr. Matthew Herder argues that agency capture and politicized discretion drive delays in confirmatory trials of accelerated approval drugs amongst other concerns at US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In highlighting this important problem and offering nuanced insight into agency workings based in part on interviews with twenty-three unnamed FDA officials and a three-drug case study, Dr. Herder suggests two innovative solutions. However, amidst broader debates balancing agency expertise, data, and delegation, these proposed policy solutions would benefit from more corroborative evidence and consideration of institutional advantages within constitutional limits.

Capture and passive predation in times of COVID-19 pandemic

In the midst of a health crisis, a drug in development and candidate for COVID-19 contagious disease was granted orphan-drug designation (ODD). This decision by the US Food and Drug Administration was immediately denounced as an abuse of the Orphan Drug Act (ODA). This paper outlines how this decision may be considered as the result of a complex case of capture along the regulatory process. Therefore, a case study of the remdesivir episode is conducted, combining the definition of a framework for the analysis of capture and the identification of stylized facts marking the trajectory of a repositioned drug and candidate for COVID-19. In doing so, arguments are put forward to show to what extent this granting of ODD can be described as the result of a series of captures, a case of weak capture however that calls for an amendment of the ODA to preclude drugs for contagious and communicable epidemic diseases from obtaining orphan status in the first place.