An In­dia-based gener­ics man­u­fac­tur­er is once again feel­ing the wrath of US reg­u­la­tors.

Au­robindo Phar­ma has been slapped with a Form 483 fol­low­ing an in­spec­tion of the com­pa­ny’s oral man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty, the com­pa­ny an­nounced in a let­ter, while keep­ing the de­tails to a min­i­mum.

The fa­cil­i­ty is lo­cat­ed in Jad­cher­la, In­dia, out­side of the city of Hy­der­abad. The in­spec­tion be­gan last week, and con­clud­ed on Tues­day, ac­cord­ing to Au­robindo. The FDA not­ed six ob­ser­va­tions, though it’s still un­clear ex­act­ly what went wrong.

Form 483 is is­sued when in­spec­tors ob­served “any con­di­tions that in their judg­ment may con­sti­tute vi­o­la­tions of the Food Drug and Cos­met­ic (FD&C) Act and re­lat­ed Acts,” ac­cord­ing to the FDA.

“The Com­pa­ny will re­spond to the US FDA with­in the stip­u­lat­ed time­line and work close­ly with US FDA to close the ob­ser­va­tions,” Au­robindo said in the let­ter.

The in­spec­tion is cer­tain­ly not help­ing Au­robindo’s stock price $AU­ROPHAR­MA which fell over 2% to­day and has dropped more than 20% in the past year.

How­ev­er, this is not the first time the com­pa­ny has found it­self in the FDA’s crosshairs. The com­pa­ny has re­ceived 14 oth­er 483 forms for dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ing sites in Telan­gana state since 2016.

In April of this year, FDA in­spec­tors closed Au­robindo’s Day­ton, New Jer­sey site, elim­i­nat­ing 99 jobs in the process. The site re­ceived a ma­jor warn­ing let­ter in 2020, re­veal­ing that the com­pa­ny’s staff had failed to in­ves­ti­gate un­ex­plained dis­crep­an­cies or fail­ures in API batch­es and left wa­ter leaks in pack­ing rooms, where am­bi­ent mois­ture can po­ten­tial­ly con­t­a­m­i­nate APIs. The com­pa­ny was al­so ac­cused of fail­ing to iden­ti­fy im­pu­ri­ty re­sults from con­t­a­m­i­na­tion due to mor­tar.

Au­robindo’s prod­ucts have al­so been the tar­get of sev­er­al FDA re­calls. Back in Feb­ru­ary, the com­pa­ny had to re­call more than 1.15 mil­lion bot­tles of Mox­i­floxacin Oph­thalmic So­lu­tion — an an­tibi­ot­ic used to treat eye in­fec­tions like bac­te­r­i­al con­junc­tivi­tis — due to failed im­pu­ri­ties and degra­da­tion spec­i­fi­ca­tions, ac­cord­ing to The Eco­nom­ic Times.  And in Jan­u­ary, Au­robindo vol­un­tar­i­ly re­called a lot of polymyx­in B for in­jec­tion af­ter a hair was found in a vial with­in the lot. That an­tibi­ot­ic is used to treat menin­gi­tis, pneu­mo­nia, sep­sis, and uri­nary tract in­fec­tions.

The FDA al­so is­sued a warn­ing let­ter to the com­pa­ny in Jan­u­ary for an­oth­er drug man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ty in Telan­gana state in con­nec­tion with a pre­vi­ous in­spec­tion. The let­ter cit­ed de­vi­a­tions from cur­rent good man­u­fac­tur­ing prac­tices for API.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) voted unanimously in favor of “harmonizing” Covid vaccine compositions, meaning all current vaccine recipients would receive a bivalent vaccine, regardless of whether they’ve gotten their primary series.

The vote marks an effort to clear up confusion around varying formulations and dosing schedules for current primary series and booster vaccines, as well as “get closer to the strains that are circulating,” according to committee member Paul Offit, professor of pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Eli Lilly has succeeded in its attempt to get the first non-covalent version of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, or BTK, inhibitors to market, pushing it past rival Merck.

The FDA gave an accelerated nod to Lilly’s daily oral med, to be sold as Jaypirca, for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma.

The agency’s green light, disclosed by the Indianapolis Big Pharma on Friday afternoon, catapults Lilly into a field dominated by covalent BTK inhibitors, which includes AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson’s Imbruvica, AstraZeneca’s Calquence and BeiGene’s Brukinsa.

Merck’s blockbuster cancer treatment Keytruda has been handed another indication by the FDA.

The US regulator announced on Thursday that it has approved Keytruda to serve as an adjuvant treatment for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), which is its fifth indication in NSCLC and 34th indication overall.

According to a Merck release, the approval is based on data from a Phase III trial, dubbed Keynote-091, which measured disease-free survival in patients who received chemotherapy following surgery. The data from Merck displayed that Keytruda cut down on the risk of disease recurrence or death by 27% versus placebo.

The FDA hasn’t detected any potential safety signals, including for stroke, in people aged 65 years and older who have received Pfizer’s bivalent Covid booster, one senior official told members of the agency’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) on Thursday.

The update comes as the FDA and CDC investigate a “preliminary signal” that may indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke in older Americans who received Pfizer’s updated shot.

The FDA has stopped use of another drug as a result of the new coronavirus variants. On Thursday, the agency announced that AstraZeneca’s antibody combo Evusheld, which was an important prevention option for many immunocompromised people and others, is no longer authorized.

The FDA said it made its decision based on the fact that Evusheld works on fewer than 10% of circulating variants.

Evusheld was initially given emergency authorization at the end of 2021. However, as Omicron emerged, so did studies that showed Evusheld might not work against the dominant Omicron strain. In October, the FDA warned healthcare providers that Evusheld was useless against the Omicron subvariant BA.4.6. It followed that up with another announcement earlier this month that it did not think Evusheld would work against the latest Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5.