On December 20, FDA issued a new, draft guidance, “Medical Device Accessories – Describing Accessories and Classification Pathways.” This guidance is the latest chapter in the years-long, and still on-going, story of accessory classification. As you may recall, Congress and FDA have both been working …
While many were on vacation and preparing to celebrate the New Year, CDRH was announcing yet another pilot program. You may recall FDA recently announced its Digital Health Software Pre-Cert Pilot Program and its Premarket Approval Application Critical to Quality Pilot Program. The latest pilot …
Section 513 of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires FDA to consider the least burdensome means of evaluating device safety and effectiveness for Class III devices and substantial equivalence for devices requiring 510(k) clearance. Despite this legal requirement, the device industry’s position has …
On December 5, 2017, FDA issued a final guidance: Technical Considerations for Additive Manufactured Medical Devices, Guidance for Industry and Food and Drug Administration Staff. Additive Manufacturing (AM) is “a process that builds an object by iteratively building 2-dimensional (2D) layers and joining each to …
On December 18, FDA released its draft guidance, “Investigational IVDs Used in Clinical Investigations of Therapeutic Products.” This is the latest guidance from the Agency on the relationship between in vitro diagnostic (IVD) products and therapeutic products. You will recall that the Centers jointly issued the …
On November 29, 2017, CDRH issued two draft guidances regarding CLIA Waiver requests: “Select Updates for Recommendations for Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1998 (CLIA) Waiver Applications for Manufacturers of In Vitro Diagnostic Devices” (CLIA Waiver Guidance) and “Recommendations for Dual 510(k) and CLIA Waiver …
On October 30, CDRH issued the Final Guidance “De Novo Classification Process (Evaluation of Automatic Class III Designation)” (the “De Novo Guidance”). This is a final version of the 2014 draft by the same name (see our earlier blog post here). On the same day, …
On October 30, CDRH finalized the guidance entitled, “Manufacturers Sharing Patient-Specific Information From Medical Devices With Patients Upon Request”. This is the final version of the guidance, “Dissemination of Patient-Specific Information from Devices by Device Manufacturers” issued in June 2016 (see our blog post on …
On October 25, 2017, FDA issued a final guidance: Deciding When to Submit a 510(k) for a Change to an Existing Device. This guidance is a final version of the draft issued in 2016 (see our post on the 2016 draft here). Despite receiving a …
The 21st Century Cures Act (Cures), signed into law in December 2016, established a program to provide priority review and management attention for breakthrough devices. We discussed the new section of the law in our earlier post on Cures (here). The law required FDA to …
Our April 16th blog post regarding 510(k) exemptions (here) garnered a lot of comments from our readers. So we thought it was worth a second post. As you will recall, the .9 limitation says that a device of the generic type in a 510(k)‑exempt classification regulation …
Getting an early jump on winter, between September 29 and October 2, CDRH issued a blizzard of new guidance documents. All eleven of these guidances were issued based on commitments from MDUFA IV. These guidances consist of: four guidances regarding user fees for each type of …
In July of last year, FDA released a draft guidance on evaluation and reporting of age-, race-, and ethnicity-specific data in medical device clinical studies (see our post on the draft guidance here). On September 12, 2017, FDA released the final version of this guidance. The …
On September 6, 2017, FDA issued the final guidance “Design Considerations and Pre-market Submission Recommendations for Interoperable Medical Devices.” The final guidance can be found here. The document provides guidance regarding interoperable devices, which it defines as devices “that have the ability to exchange and …
The reduction in the rate of cervical cancer is one of the great success stories in public health. The introduction of the Pap smear and human papillomavirus (HPV) testing has led to a significant reduction in the rate of cervical cancer. However, there are still …
