FDA Inks Combo Product Feedback Guidance

The FDA and industry have been at loggerheads over various issues surrounding combination products, but a new draft guidance may help resolve some of those conflicts. The draft deals with industry requests for feedback on combination product applications, but does not take up the product jurisdiction question, which is again the subject of litigation.

The draft guidance introduces the phrase “combination product agreement meeting,” or CPAM, one of several types of meetings sponsors can invoke in obtaining feedback from the agency on scientific and regulatory questions. Center-specific interactions are also mentioned in the draft, and the agency said that CPAMs should complement rather than replace application-based mechanisms for each center. CPAMs also are not appropriate for resolving any disputes that are usually taken up by the lead center’s dispute resolution or appeals processes.

The guidance further states that sponsors should channel all communications to the designated point of contact, or POC, even if the sponsor’s query takes up a question that is better addressed by a center other than the lead center. The draft is a response to Section 3038 of the 21st Century Cures Act, which covers a number of elements of the combination product review question.

In addition to defining the term “primary mode of action” and mandating that the FDA not use the mere presence of chemical action to justify designating the product a drug, Section 3038 of the Cures Act calls on the agency to issue guidance that characterizes a “structured process for managing presubmission interactions with sponsors.” That guidance is due within four years of enactment of the Cures Act and limits the comment period to 60 days. President Barack Obama signed the legislation in December 2016.

Meanwhile, another product jurisdiction case is in play in the courts, suggesting the agency still has its hands full persuading industry of its interpretation of the primary mode of action question.

DOJ Recovered $3 Billion in FCA Cases in 2019

The Department of Justice has enacted several changes to its approach to False Claims Act litigation over the past few years, but federal attorneys nonetheless managed to claw back more than $3 billion in settlements and judgments in 2019, according to a recent statement. As might be expected, the bulk of that sum was obtained in actions related to industries in healthcare, and 2019 marked the tenth consecutive year in which at least $2 billion was reclaimed in such settlements.

Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said $2.6 billion of the amount reclaimed in 2019 involved hospitals, doctors, and makers of drugs and devices, adding that the volume of activity reflects the Trump administration’s emphasis on deterring fraud and abuse. A large portion of the recoveries revolved around opioid analgesics, although even the nursing home industry did not escape scrutiny. The statement indicated that 633 whistleblower lawsuits were filed in 2019, averaging to roughly a dozen new cases each week.

Despite the DOJ’s praise for the volume of recoveries, the amount in 2019 falls far short of the $4.7 billion recovered in 2016. That amount was reportedly the third highest amount in history at the time, and only slightly more than half ($2.5 billion) came from healthcare prosecutions, approximately the same amount recovered from these industries in 2019.

FDA Revisits Combination Product Controversies

The FDA’s efforts to regulate combination products have run across some legal challenges, but more often the agency finds it difficult to implement regulations for combo products because of the complexities inherent to such products. In a recent notification, the FDA said it would continue to exercise enforcement discretion for some postmarket safety reporting requirements, but the agency ran afoul of the primary mode of action question yet again in a new draft guidance that takes up the product designation problem.

Another Day, Another Reporting Delay

The agency announced in April that it would continue to exercise enforcement discretion for a number of the postmarket reporting requirements for combo products, but the policy has been lingering for at least a year. The question arose in March 2018, when the agency posted a draft guidance that attempted to provide some direction for the December 2016 final rule for the same subject. This subject ranges back at least as far as 2009, however, the year of a proposed rule for combination product postmarket reporting, demonstrating that this topic has perplexed the agency for a decade.

Much of the difficulty revolves of course around the fact that there is no single combination product type, and there are differences in how each type makes itself felt upon the regulatory burden of the makers of each constituent part. The 2018 draft’s treatment of postmarket reporting for an approved component of an investigational combination product varies from the use of that component in an already-approved combination as well, and the net effect is to present stakeholders with three very different scenarios within a single document. Thus, some have called for a separate guidance for cross-labeled combination products at the very least, a proposal the agency may be unwilling to adopt.

One of the difficulties for the FDA is that stakeholders are not entirely united as to how the agency should approach these questions, but the deadlines for adverse event reporting requirements are already different for drugs and devices. These differences have fed calls for a pan-agency approach to the question of postmarket reporting requirements, a proposition that may strike some as only slightly less ambitious than a pan-agency approach to good manufacturing practices. Either way, the latest document is an immediately-in-effect policy statement that provides enforcement discretion through July 31, 2020, for combination products that fall under Medical Device Reporting requirements, and through Jan. 31, 2021 for products that employ the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

No Cure for the Cures Act

The FDA took another stab at the combination product designation question in a February draft guidance dealing with the principles of combo product premarket pathways, but as is often the case, the agency’s effort failed to win any converts among drug and device makers, due in large part to the question of a combination product’s primary mode of action (PMOA). That particular discussion has an interesting legal history, mostly involving France’s Prevor, which fought the agency to at least a draw in two visits to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

One of the notable features of the February draft guidance is that it stipulates that applicants provide enough data in an application to allow the centers of jurisdiction to review each component as though it were a separate application. The draft seemed largely mum on the cross-labeled combination product category, however, so much so that at least one observer questioned whether the FDA had intended to exclude cross-labeled products from the scope of the draft.

More than one trade group questioned the draft’s provisions that would seem to give the FDA wide discretion in assigning a combination product to a center that would ordinarily be inappropriate for the product’s PMOA. This question has roiled relations between the agency and industry at least as far back as 2004, the year the FDA opened a docket to deal with the PMOA question. A decade and a half of further consideration does not seem to have answered some of the underlying issues despite that the 21st Century Cures Act called on the FDA to resolve these problems.

The Cures Act directed the agency to assign primary jurisdiction for a combination product to the center that would be most appropriate for the component deemed to present the PMOA. Critics of the February 2019 draft guidance seem to have determined that the agency is resisting this legislative directive with all the regulatory muscle it can muster. The view of stakeholders may be that this draft guidance is unworkable in its present form, leaving industry with the prospect of another of those lingering draft guidances that is ultimately neither finalized nor withdrawn.