No more FDA adcomm votes? Reforms brew as new research highlights decline in meetings
As the FDA explores how to reform its advisory committees in ways to ensure the agency receives more timely and sound advice — a process the agency acknowledges is ongoing and not easy — new research points to a decline in adcomms in recent years, and an FDA commissioner who has insisted there may be fewer votes at future meetings, too.
From 2010 to 2021, the FDA held 409 adcomms related to human drugs, but the meetings were convened “less frequently over time, from a high of 50 in 2012 to a low of 18 in 2020 and 2021,” researchers from Harvard’s Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, and Law (PORTAL) wrote in JAMA Health Forum today. “Much of this decrease occurred at committee meetings involving votes on initial approvals, which declined from a high of 26 in 2012 to a low of 8 in 2021.”
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