Food and drug law journal最新文献

Biotechnology is about to spill the banks of federal regulation. New genetic engineering techniques like CRISPR-Cas9 promise revolutionary breakthroughs in medicine, agriculture, and public health—but those techniques would not be regulated under the terms of the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology. This revolutionary moment in biotechnology offers an opportunity to correct the flaws in the framework, which was hastily patched together at the advent of the technology. The framework has never captured all relevant technologies, has never satisfied the public that risk is being effectively managed, and has never been accessible to small companies and publicly-funded labs that increasingly are positioned to make radical, life-saving innovations. This Article offers a proposal for new legislation that would reshape biotechnology regulation to better meet these goals. Key reforms include tying regulation to risk rather than technology category; consolidating agency review; capturing distinct regulatory expertise through inter-agency consultations; creating a clearinghouse to help guide applicants and disseminate information; setting up more comprehensive monitoring of environmental effects; and providing federal leadership to fill key data gaps and address socio-economic impacts.

In 2012, a federal court of appeals struck down an FDA rule requiring graphic health warnings on cigarettes as violating First Amendment commercial speech protections. Tobacco product inserts and onserts can more readily avoid First Amendment constraints while delivering more extensive information to tobacco users, and can work effectively to support and encourage smoking cessation. This paper examines FDA’s authority to require effective inserts and onserts and shows how FDA could design and support them to avoid First Amendment problems. Through this process, the paper offers helpful insights regarding how key Tobacco Control Act provisions can and should be interpreted and applied to follow and promote the statute’s purposes and objectives. The paper’s rigorous analysis of existing First Amendment case law relating to compelled commercial speech also provides useful guidance for any government efforts either to compel product disclosures or to require government messaging in or on commercial products or their advertising, whether done for remedial, purely informational, or behavior modification purposes.

Ideal therapeutics have low toxicity and can effectively manage condition(s) or disease(s). The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) marketing category of therapeutics called “medical foods” (MFs) meets such a definition. Medical foods have existed in Federal law since passage the Orphan Drug Act in 1988, which created a category of nutritional therapeutics separate from drugs. Unfortunately, MFs are not widely understood by the medical community or utilized in all patients who need them due to lack of a FDA-approval process, unclear and contradictory guidance especially with regard for need for an investigational new drug (IND) application, and no clear regulations regarding their development and marketing. The goals of this article are to propose “Best Practices” to guide the medical food industry in the development and marketing of products as well as to serve as a starting point for suggestions regarding further FDA regulation so that therapeutics which are shown to be generally recognized as safe (GRAS), provide food ingredients to meet a distinctive nutritional requirement for a specific condition/disease and are proven effective for the management for that condition/disease can be used to benefit patients who need them.

Drug development requires patience. Beyond the inherent uncertainty of the development process itself, U.S. drug developers must comply with the regulatory approval process overseen by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Because this process takes time, drug development also costs money. Drug companies seeking to raise funds in U.S. capital markets must navigate the securities regime governed by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). Despite their similar roles as protectors of consumers and public markets, SEC and FDA send conflicting signals about the information drug companies need to disclose to the public. While SEC primarily regulates by mandating public disclosure, FDA has historically regulated drugs through its pre-approval process and has only recently begun to add disclosure mechanisms to its regulatory regime. Moreover, a trio of federal statutes requires FDA to keep sensitive information submitted by drug companies confidential. The regimes’ distinct priorities and approaches create tensions that surface when publicly traded drug companies must decide whether and how to publicly disclose information related to drug development. This paper surveys the two agencies’ conflicting priorities and regulations and explores the resulting problems that can arise for drug companies. It recommends that Congress liberalize statutory restraints on FDA’s ability to disclose sponsor-submitted confidential information in order to help alleviate the tensions between these regimes and provide the public with more accurate information about drug companies and their products.

The United States has a high stake in China’s serious food safety problem, as food products of Chinese origin have dominated the U.S. food market in numerous areas and continue to grow. The conclusion of the U.S.-China Food Safety Agreement (“the Agreement”) has allowed FDA to strengthen regulatory cooperation with its Chinese counterpart in various aspects. The Agreement also paves the way for the implementation of the new regulatory tools incorporated in FSMA, especially in the cross-border context. However, both the Agreement and FSMA have certain crucial limitations that may create future hurdles to effective implementation in the U.S.-China cooperation. This paper therefore endeavors to first examine China’s governance challenges over food safety, with a focus on the 2009 Food Safety Law, the 2015 Amendment, and the fundamental problem of “thin” rule of law. This paper moves to analyze the U.S.-China Food Safety Agreement, reviewing the agreement’s strengths and weaknesses. It further assesses FSMA’s innovative institutional design to regulate imported food products and its limitations. However, both the U.S.-China Food Safety Agreement and FSMA arguably create a regulatory dilemma for FDA when addressing imported food safety, due to structural mismatch between the broad scope of power granted to FDA and the long chain of power outsourcing to governments or private companies as primary “regulators.” Neither the Agreement nor FSMA give FDA adequate capacity to closely oversee such “agents” along the chain of power outsourcing. Framing the U.S.-China food safety cooperation as a multilayer structure that “outsources power” to “import safety,” this paper concludes by stressing the need for a robust accountability and effective mechanism for U.S.-China food safety cooperation.

Systemic social justice issues are characterized as having complex and far-reaching causes. Food justice is one such an issue. Food justice is defined as “justice for all [people] in the food system,” from agricultural production to consumer products. Policies seeking to remedy systemic social justice issues often need to include the attention of many levels of government and coordination across multiple agencies to move issues forward. That is why finding a model for interagency collaboration that has evidenced success, especially over the long-term, is inspiring and worth mirroring.This Comment compares food justice to the environmental justice movement, and proposes modeling a federal, interagency program to address food justice based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Interagency Working Group (EJ IWG). This Comment includes an overview of the food justice movement, and argues that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), despite its history of civil rights violations, would be the best federal agency to lead an interagency working group because it administers essential rural development and consumer programs. It also explores whether the model employed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJ IWG is a viable model for a food justice program at the USDA, and what features of the EJ IWG would suit such a food justice interagency working group.

In August 2015, more than 110 U.S. oncologists published an article detailing the deleterious effects of rising cancer drugs prices and calling for numerous reforms to our prescription drug system. These prices are the result of decades of political maneuvering; they reflect the way our country has chosen to pay for healthcare, to foster and reward innovation, and to promote a national free market system. While these choices have resulted in immense profits for pharmaceutical companies—and subsidized the development of prescription drugs globally—they have also left many cancer patients unable to afford their medications. And, without providing significant improvements in life expectancy, the rising prices of cancer drugs seem like an unreasonable burden on U.S. healthcare spending. A multitude of reforms have been proposed. At the federal level, many of the reforms seek to amend existing regulatory regimes, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, reforming the patent system, and allowing patients to import drugs from other countries. The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have pushed back against almost all of them. Some of these proposals are more ambitious than others; some more likely to succeed. With costs rising every day, policy makers, legislators, and industry professionals need to focus their attention on those reforms that are attainable and will result in sustainable, reduced prescription drug prices. This paper discusses various U.S. regulatory frameworks that impact prescription drug prices and evaluates proposed reforms to these frameworks in terms of which ones are most likely to succeed.

This article examines the strength of scientific and clinical evidence for FDA's nineteen non-AIDS, non-cancer Subpart H approval determinations over the Accelerated Approval program's twenty-four year existence. The authors researched the bases for FDA's determinations when an unvalidated surrogate or intermediate clinical endpoint is "reasonably likely to predict clinical benefit." The four key factors set forth in FDA's "Guidance for Industry, Expedited Programs for Serious Conditions - Drugs and Biologics" were applied to past Subpart H approvals. For the nineteen precedents, the authors found wide variances between the quantum and quality of evidence on each of the four factors, indicating that a lack of evidence on any single factor was not disqualifying in and of itself. The results of this study, therefore, show that FDA exercises extraordinarily more regulatory flexibility than either FDA's foundational statutes or even FDA' s most recent 2014 Expedited Programs Guidance explicitly express. Given recent legislative exhortations and the increasing promise of personalized medicine and translational sciences, the authors conclude that Subpart H should be further explored and utilized. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the orecedents established in the nineteen approvals.