Hung ju­ry vote leaves FDA with a dif­fi­cult de­ci­sion on Durec­t's non-opi­oid painkiller

A split ad­vi­so­ry pan­el vote on Durect’s non-opi­oid drug to man­age post-sur­gi­cal pain is on­ly go­ing to make the FDA’s task hard­er.

Af­ter FDA staff re­view­ers is­sued an in­ter­nal re­view that un­der­scored their un­ease with the side-ef­fect pro­file of the long-act­ing anes­thet­ic posimir — on Thurs­day a pan­el of in­de­pen­dent ex­perts could not reach a con­sen­sus on whether to back the ther­a­py.

Six pan­elists en­dorsed ap­proval, while the re­main­ing six dis­sent­ed. The ther­a­py is a for­mu­la­tion of the anes­thet­ic bupi­va­caine and is de­signed to man­age pain up to three days fol­low­ing surgery af­ter be­ing ad­min­is­tered di­rect­ly in­to the sur­gi­cal in­ci­sion.

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