Regulatory

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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.
While approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, the Alzheimer’s drug failed to win the backing of the U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, which said that its benefits were “too small to justify the cost.”
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.
In a letter to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, a House committee flagged several U.S. companies—including Eli Lilly and Pfizer—that have allegedly worked with the People’s Liberation Army on clinical trials in Xinjiang, raising ethical and intellectual property concerns.
FDA
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.
Two months after winning FDA approval in the same indication, AbbVie and Genmab on Monday secured the European Commission’s nod for its bispecific antibody Tepkinly for the most common type of low-grade non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
FDA
In 2023, the FDA greenlit 55 new drugs and 34 cell and gene therapies. Follow along as BioSpace keeps you up to date on all of the FDA’s decisions in 2024.
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.
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.
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