November 23, 2015 - Bill of Health

The FDA de-regulates the first genetically-engineered animal

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 jsax 2 Comments

On November 19, 2015, the FDA de-regulated the AquAdvantage Salmon. This salmon is genetically engineered to grow faster. This is the first time the FDA has de-regulated a genetically engineered animal.

Let me just say from the outset that the scientific consensus is clear that genetically engineered food is as safe as conventional food. Despite the onslaught of public outrage against GMO food, most of the main arguments against GMO food are just hype.

The genie came out of the bottle a long time ago and it’s not going back in. This happens time and again with scientific advances. Over the past few decades, our ability to understand, manipulate, edit, and otherwise employ the DNA of various organisms to facilitate human understanding has grown exponentially. Efforts to resist, combat, or villain-ize the application of biotechnology to impact society might delay, but will not ultimately succeed in keeping the application of scientific discoveries at bay.

‘The Week in Health Law’ Podcast

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Nicolas Terry

This week we welcomed W. Nicholson Price, an Assistant Professor at the University of New Hampshire School of Law with a J.D. and Ph.D. (Biological Sciences) from Columbia University. Nicholson’s work on both IP and health care covers a wide array of important issues and was recently featured in a New York Times article.

Nic led off with a tour de force analysis of the recent LabMD decision by an ALJ at the FTC, challenging apocalyptic post-mortems of the case in light of Wyndham & extant FTC common law. Frank riffed on Tim Jost’s recent Health Affairs post on deductibles and legislative rulemaking and called for a bit more service journalism at the New York Times when it covers health and education finance.

We then discussed black box medicine and the new challenges posed to both health and patent law by opaque predictive analytics. Consider, for instance, the challenge in even describing such practices for “written description” purposes. Nicholson offered a big picture view on the relative value of patent and trade secrecy law in incentivizing innovation here.

The Week in Health Law Podcast from Frank Pasquale and Nicolas Terry is a commuting-length discussion about some of the more thorny issues in Health Law & Policy. Subscribe at iTunes, listen at Stitcher Radio, Tunein and Podbean, or search for The Week in Health Law in your favorite podcast app. Show notes and more are at TWIHL.com. If you have comments, an idea for a show or a topic to discuss you can find us on twitter @nicolasterry @FrankPasquale @WeekInHealthLaw

Vulnerability, Coercion, and Undue Influence: From the Mud into the Muck?

November 23, 2015August 5, 2019 Govind Persad Leave a comment

According to the NPRM, “the only vulnerability that needs to be considered is vulnerability to coercion or undue influence, and not other types of vulnerability.” It therefore replaces all standalone uses of “vulnerable” with “vulnerable to coercion or undue influence.” This change is justified on the basis that it will “provide greater consistency and clarity in IRB consideration of vulnerability of subject populations in research activities and appropriate protections,” where the vulnerable populations in question are “children, prisoners, pregnant women, physically or mentally disabled persons, or economically or educationally disadvantaged persons.”

Two provisions of the Common Rule (§107.a and §111.a.3) currently discuss vulnerability without further specification, whereas one (§111.b) discusses vulnerability to coercion and undue influence. Deleting §111.b’s reference to coercion and undue influence, however, would achieve consistency while making even fewer changes than the NPRM proposes. The proposed revisions, then, rest on improved clarity rather than improved consistency.

I doubt that narrowing vulnerability by adding the terms “coercion” and (in particular) “undue influence” adds much clarity. Rather, these changes may reduce protections against research flaws other than coercion and undue influence without offering counterbalancing advantages for the research enterprise. Read More

FDA Releases Report Detailing Problematic Laboratory-Developed Tests

November 23, 2015November 23, 2015 rachelsachs Leave a comment

By Rachel Sachs

Last week, the FDA issued a report presenting 20 case studies of laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) that have or may have harmed patients, in support of its ongoing efforts to impose greater regulatory oversight on LDTs. The report came just before yet another House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing on the issue, and the timing of its release may have been motivated in part by questions FDA officials faced at the last Congressional hearing, about the existing evidence of harm to patients. The report categorizes the 20 case studies into seven groups, organized by the primary problem posed by the LDT: those with a high degree of false positives (the test yields a positive result when the disease is not present), those with a high degree of false negatives (the test yields a negative result when the disease is present), those which yield both false positives and false negatives, those which test for a factor seemingly unrelated to the disease in question, those linked to treatments based on disproven scientific concepts, those which affirmatively undermined the drug approval process, and of course, “other.”