Category: Patient Care

Syringe being filled from a vial. Vaccine concept illustration.

From 9/11 to COVID-19: A Brief History of FDA Emergency Use Authorization

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Cross-posted from COVID-19 and The Law, where it originally appeared on January 14, 2021. 

By Jonathan Iwry

The ongoing fight against COVID-19 has thrown a spotlight on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its power to grant emergency use authorizations (EUAs). EUA authority permits FDA to authorize formally unapproved products for temporary use as emergency countermeasures against threats to public health and safety.

Under § 564 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act), use of FDA’s EUA authority requires a determination that an emergency exists by secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, or the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as well as a declaration by the HHS Secretary that emergency circumstances exist warranting the issuance of EUAs. Each issuance of an EUA requires that FDA conclude that:

  • it is reasonable to believe that a given product “may be effective” as an emergency countermeasure,
  • the known and potential benefits of authorization outweigh the known and potential risks, and
  • no formally approved alternatives are available at the time.

Annie Kapnick’s post on COVID-19 and FDA’s EUA authority provides a helpful overview of FDA’s emergency powers and their use in response to the pandemic. A brief look at the history of FDA’s emergency powers, including key events leading up to their enactment — Thalidomide, swine flu, AIDS, and 9/11 — offers perspective on the situation facing FDA today and its implications for the future. The history of EUA illustrates how its use today against COVID-19 involves fundamental questions about the role of public officials, scientific expertise, and administrative norms in times of crisis.

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Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Beatrice Brown, Neeraj Patel, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues.

Below are the citations for papers identified from the month of December. The selections feature topics ranging from an analysis of potential approaches for evaluating novel SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates after other vaccines have already been authorized; to an examination of social, cultural, and economic aspects of microbial resistance; to a study on clinical evidence supporting FDA clearance of novel therapeutics devices via the de novo pathway. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

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Data Talking to Machines: The Intersection of Deep Phenotyping and Artificial Intelligence

Carmel Shachar Leave a comment

By Carmel Shachar

As digital phenotyping technology is developed and deployed, clinical teams will need to carefully consider when it is appropriate to leverage artificial intelligence or machine learning, versus when a more human touch is needed.

Digital phenotyping seeks to utilize the rivers of data we generate to better diagnose and treat medical conditions, especially mental health ones, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The amount of data potentially available, however, is at once both digital phenotyping’s greatest strength and a significant challenge.

For example, the average smartphone user spends 2.25 hours a day using the 60-90 apps that he or she has installed on their phone. Setting aside all other data streams, such as medical scans, how should clinicians sort through the data generated by smartphone use to arrive at something meaningful? When dealing with this quantity of data generated by each patient or research subject, how does the care team ensure that they do not miss important predictors of health?

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Bias, Fairness, and Deep Phenotyping

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Nicole Martinez

Deep phenotyping research has the potential to improve understandings of social and structural factors that contribute to psychiatric illness, allowing for more effective approaches to address inequities that impact mental health.

But, in order to build upon the promise of deep phenotyping and minimize the potential for bias and discrimination, it will be important to incorporate the perspectives of diverse communities and stakeholders in the development and implementation of research projects.

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Transplant Genomics: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Tamar Schiff

The appeal of precision medicine is of particular significance in transplantation. Treatment options are already integrally dependent on genetic factors – the donor-recipient match – and the demand for transplantable tissues far outstrips the available supply.

And the potential is only growing. Advances in genetic and genomic studies have identified an increasing number of novel biomarkers of potential use in transplant-related care. These include predictors of disease course, graft survival, response to immunosuppression, and likelihood of disease recurrence or other complications.

With wider availability of sequencing technologies and innovations in databanking, future clinical applications in transplant care may require ever-growing considerations of the significance of genetic variants, fair access to precision medicine therapeutics and participation in research, ethical approaches to data aggregation, and social determinants of health.

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The False Dilemmas of the Fifth Circuit’s HIPAA Ruling

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By Leslie Francis

In a caustic opinion issued on January 14, the Fifth Circuit vacated penalties assessed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) against the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center for HIPAA security breaches.

As has happened to many other health care entities, M.D. Anderson had employees who were not careful with their laptops and thumb drives (and the data therein). A laptop with the unencrypted protected health care information of nearly 30,000 patients was stolen. Unencrypted thumb drives with information on another almost 6,000 patients were lost. M.D. Anderson disclosed the security breaches to HHS, which assessed civil monetary penalties for violation of HIPAA’s encryption and disclosure rules. M.D. Anderson then filed a petition for review, which resulted in the Fifth Circuit holding that the agency action was arbitrary and capricious for failure to consider an important aspect of the problem.

Commentators have already pointed out that this decision will reverberate throughout the HIPAA enforcement world. As it does, I hope it is met with scorn, for it trades on the informal logical fallacy of the false dilemma in two noteworthy ways.

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Symposium Introduction: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Deep Phenotyping

Francis X. Shen Leave a comment

This post is the introduction to our Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Deep Phenotyping symposium. All contributions to the symposium will be available here.

By Francis X. Shen

This digital symposium explores the ethical, legal, and social implications of advances in deep phenotyping in psychiatry research.

Deep phenotyping in psychiatric research and practice is a term used to describe the collection and analysis of multiple streams of behavioral and biological data, some of this data collected around the clock, to identify and intervene in critical health events.

By combining 24/7 data — on location, movement, email and text communications, and social media — with brain scans, genetics/genomics, neuropsychological batteries, and clinical interviews, researchers will have an unprecedented amount of objective, individual-level data. Analyzing this data with ever-evolving artificial intelligence (AI) offers the possibility of intervening early with precision and could even prevent the most critical sentinel events.

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How Can Policymakers Encourage COVID-19 Vaccine Trials for Children?

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Cross-posted from Written Description, where it originally appeared on December 18, 2020. 

By Jacob S. Sherkow, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Nicholson Price, and Rachel Sachs

The past two weeks have been full of exciting COVID-19 vaccine news, including the FDA’s emergency use authorizations (EUAs) for the Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and the nationwide rollout of Pfizer’s vaccine. Choosing how to allocate access to vaccine doses has been left to individual states, leaving policymakers with difficult decisions about how to prioritize their populations, complicated in part by the federal government’s reduction in some vaccine shipments.

With a limited supply of doses, who should get the first shots? Some commentators have suggested prioritizing children early for a host of reasons, including hope about children returning to school. Last month a New York Times column asserted that “saving the most lives could mean prioritizing the vaccination of children and young adults.” But there is an important reason that kids can’t be part of the vaccine line yet: we don’t know whether these vaccines work for them. In this post, we explain why COVID-19 vaccines are only just starting to be tested in children and what policymakers can do to spur pediatric vaccine trials.

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Monthly Round-Up of What to Read on Pharma Law and Policy

Ameet Sarpatwari Leave a comment

By Ameet Sarpatwari, Beatrice Brown, Neeraj Patel, and Aaron S. Kesselheim

Each month, members of the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) review the peer-reviewed medical literature to identify interesting empirical studies, policy analyses, and editorials on health law and policy issues.

Below are the citations for papers identified from the month of November. The selections feature topics ranging from an analysis of Medicare Part D spending on inhalers from 2012 to 2018, to an overview of vaccine development and regulations to better understand how COVID-19 vaccines will be evaluated, to an analysis of the ethical implications of emergency authorization of COVID-19 drugs for patient care. A full posting of abstracts/summaries of these articles may be found on our website.

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