Pres­i­dent Joe Biden this af­ter­noon signed a stop­gap fund­ing bill that will keep the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment open through the end of next week while House and Sen­ate ap­pro­pri­a­tors hash out a year-long so­lu­tion.

The Sen­ate yes­ter­day evening passed the stop­gap bill by a vote of 71-19, fol­low­ing a House vote on Wednes­day of 224-201 in fa­vor. The bill in­cludes sev­er­al punt­ed reau­tho­riza­tions for an­oth­er week. The pro­vi­sions in­clude $6.9 mil­lion in or­phan drug grants for next year and an­oth­er $5.7 mil­lion for the reau­tho­riza­tion of the Best Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals for Chil­dren pro­gram.

But House and Sen­ate ap­pro­pri­a­tions lead­ers are putting to­geth­er a much larg­er, $1.7 tril­lion om­nibus bill for next year that needs to get done be­fore next Fri­day, and will like­ly in­clude longer reauths for those items and more.

In fact, the bill could po­ten­tial­ly in­clude all sorts of FDA- and phar­ma-re­lat­ed pro­vi­sions — every­thing from ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval re­forms to ways to im­prove di­ver­si­ty in clin­i­cal tri­als to an over­haul of lab-de­vel­oped test reg­u­la­tions — de­pend­ing on how the spend­ing lev­els are set.

Sen­ate Ap­pro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said in a state­ment on Tues­day that he and vice chair Richard Shel­by (R-AL) and House Ap­pro­pri­a­tions Com­mit­tee Chair Rosa De­Lau­ro (D-CT) “reached a bi­par­ti­san, bi­cam­er­al frame­work that should al­low us to fin­ish an om­nibus ap­pro­pri­a­tions bill that can pass the House and Sen­ate and be signed in­to law by the Pres­i­dent.”

De­tails of what’s in that fi­nal pack­age, text of which could ar­rive as soon as Mon­day, have been hard to come by.

Yale’s Resh­ma Ra­machan­dran, board chair of the non­prof­it Doc­tors for Amer­i­ca, told End­points News that there are, “Pos­i­tive signs from both sides of aisle on AA [ac­cel­er­at­ed ap­proval] re­forms and even clin­i­cal tri­al di­ver­si­ty.”

Sen­ate Ma­jor­i­ty Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told Politi­co to­day that an over­haul of the way the FDA reg­u­lates di­etary sup­ple­ments is off the ta­ble. But pret­ty much any­thing else — from AA re­forms to an over­haul of the way lab-de­vel­oped tests are reg­u­lat­ed — could be on the ta­ble.

The Al­liance for a Stronger FDA added in an email on Fri­day:

A num­ber of pos­si­ble add-ons could im­pact FDA, no­tably whether House E&C and Sen­ate HELP can ne­go­ti­ate an agree­ment on the pol­i­cy and pro­gram lan­guage stripped from the Sep­tem­ber’s user fee reau­tho­riza­tions. Even if such an agree­ment is reached, un­cer­tain­ty re­mains whether it will be added in the om­nibus in the face of dozens of Mem­bers and in­ter­est groups try­ing to add their pri­or­i­ties to the Om­nibus bill.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

The DC Circuit Court has struck a blow against the pharmaceutical lobbying group PhRMA and other plaintiffs’ attempt to stop states from importing drugs from Canada.

Joined alongside public health group Partnership for Safe Medicines and advocacy group Council for Affordable Health Coverage, PhRMA was rebuffed by Judge Timothy Kelly on Monday, who dismissed the civil suit due to a lack of standing.