Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is cracking down on makers of medical devices that fall in the most risky category of products approved by the FDA, ordering the companies to provide tougher evidence of their products’ safety and effectiveness or pay for extensive clinical trials for their products currently on the market, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The pressure from the FDA is long coming. In 1990, Congress ordered the more rigorous testing of medical devices before they became available for use, however the FDA never finished implementing the law, getting caught up in a federal loophole that allowed products that are “substantially equivalent” to combinations of other products marketed before 1976 to be sold. Thus, hundreds of new “Class C” devices were approved and made available for use. Class C is the FDA’s most risky category.

Products that currently fall in the Class C category include external heart defibrillators from Medtronic Inc., Royal Phillips Electronics NV and Zoll Medical Corp; dialysis catheters from Covidien Ltd.; hip joints from Zimmer Holdings Inc.; spinal screws from Medtronic and Johnson & Johnson; and a heart pump from Abiomed Inc.

The FDA’s recent action on the measure is spurred by the Government Accountability Office, which criticized the delay last January. The FDA will issue the regulations to the makers of the high-risk medical devices and based on the data, the agency will determine whether to reclassify devices to a less risky category or require the manufacturers to undergo further, more rigorous pre-market testing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.