Of FDA and food safety

To ensure compliance with its regulations, the FDA employs over 1,000 investigators and inspectors who visit over 15,000 food-processing, drug-manufacturing, and other facilities each year. If it finds violations of law, the FDA first encourages an offending company to voluntarily correct the problem or to recall a faulty product from the market. If the firm does not voluntarily comply with the law, the FDA may take it to court and seek criminal penalties against it. The FDA may also seize faulty products, order product recalls, seek injunctive relief, impose fines, and take other types of enforcement action. Each year, the FDA declares about 3,000 products and 30,000 import shipments to be unacceptable in various ways.

The FDA employs over 2,000 scientists—including 900 chemists and 300 microbiologists—who provide the scientific evidence to back up its regulatory and inspection duties. These scientists analyze samples of products for purity and review test results of new products. The FDA itself does not do research for a new medical product. Instead, it evaluates the results of studies undertaken by the manufacturer.

Contemporary and Prior FDA :

The FDA is the oldest consumer-protection agency in the nation. It was established in 1906 from existing governmental agencies by the Food and Drug Act, which gave the agency its regulatory power. Previously called the Division of Chemistry, the Bureau of Chemistry, and the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration, the agency's first, primary responsibility was to ensure the safety and purity of food sold to Americans.

Food production in the United States has been regulated since the late eighteenth century. Colonies and, later, states passed laws banning impurities from selected foods. In 1848, the United States began regulating imported drugs, under the Drug Importation Act (Ch. LXX, 9 Stat. 237). The enforcement of food and drug laws was first assigned to the Chemical Division of the new u.s. department of agriculture (USDA) in 1862 (12 Stat. 387).

The need for laws to regulate food and drug purity became increasingly urgent in the late nineteenth century, when substances such as opium, cocaine, and heroin were commonly added to medicinal elixirs and tonics. The need for government regulation was also made evident in Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, which exposed the unsanitary conditions of Chicago's meatpacking industry and shocked the nation. On June 30, 1906, Congress, with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, passed two landmark pieces of Progressive Era legislation that strengthened the government's ability to protect consumers: the Food and Drug Act (34 Stat. 768 [21 U.S.C.A. § 1–15]) and the Meat Inspection Act (21 U.S.C.A. § 601 et seq.). The former prohibited interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks, and drugs, and the latter addressed the unsanitary conditions and use of poisonous preservatives and dyes in the meatpacking industry.

In 1927, Congress authorized the creation of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1930, the agency's name was changed to the current one, Food and Drug Administration (Agriculture Appropriation Act, 46 Stat. 976).

In 1937, 107 people died after taking the elixir sulfanilamide, a supposedly healing tonic. This tragedy prompted the passage of the next major reform of food and drug law, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (21U.S.C.A. § 301 et seq.). The FDA was then entrusted with the regulation of cosmetics and therapeutic devices and was authorized to do factory inspections. Even more importantly, the act required new drugs to be tested on animals and humans for safety before being marketed. In 1957, the Food Additives Amendment (Pub. L. 85-250, Aug. 31, 1957, Stat. 567) required the evaluation of food additives to establish safety, and in the following year, the Delaney Clause (Pub. L. 85-929, Sept. 6, 1958, 72 Stat. 1784) forbade the use in food of substances found to cause cancer in laboratory animals.

Today, the FDA regulates the labeling, cleanliness and purity of all foods except meat and poultry (which are regulated by the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service). It ensures the safety of the nation's blood supply and other biologics, such as vaccines and transplant tissue. Drugs must be tested, manufactured and labeled according to FDA standards before they can be sold or prescribed. Medical devices such as pacemakers, contact lenses, hearing aids and breast implants are regulated by the FDA.

X-ray machines, CT scanners, mammography scanners and ultrasound equipment also fall under FDA oversight. So do cosmetics. And the FDA takes care of our livestock and pets by ensuring the safety of livestock feed, pet food, and veterinary drugs and devices.

The process by which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves drugs as safe and effective is generally long and complicated, though it may vary according to the type of drug and the nature of the illness for which it is being developed. The FDA refers to drugs under development as investigational new drugs, or INDs.

The evaluation of new drugs requires the skills of many different FDA scientists and professionals performing a wide variety of tasks. Biochemists and molecular biologists evaluate the basic chemistry and biology of new chemical compounds and molecular structures. Toxicologists assess the potential harm of proposed drugs, and pharmacologists study how these drugs affect the body and are broken down and absorbed by it. Computer scientists create electronic models that aid in the understanding of new chemicals. Physicians evaluate the results of clinical trials, assessing both the beneficial and adverse effects of the drugs. And statisticians evaluate the design and results of controlled studies.

It is an expensive and time consuming process, particularly for the company developing the drug, called a drug sponsor. A sponsor spends an average of $359 million for each new drug brought to market. Typically, the process takes eight and a half years and may be divided into roughly three stages: preclinical trials, involving animal and other laboratory tests (lasting one and a half years on average); clinical trials, involving tests on humans (five years); and FDA review (two years).

Preclinical Trials : Once a sponsor has developed a drug, it must test the drug on animals in the laboratory. In doing so, the drug sponsor must follow FDA guidelines and regulations. These tests, also called preclinical trials, are usually done on more than one species of animals. FDA guidelines call for the inspection of animal laboratories every two years to ensure that they are being operated according to the administration's regulations.

After short-term lab testing has been performed and the sponsor has deemed its results adequate, the sponsor submits test data and plans for future clinical trials to the FDA. FDA scientists, together with a local institutional review board composed of scientists, ethicists, and nonscientists, then conduct a thirty-day safety review to decide whether to allow testing on humans. The vast majority of new drugs tested in the laboratory are rejected by either the sponsor or the FDA because they are unsafe or ineffective.

If the FDA indicates approval, the drug sponsor may begin clinical testing on humans. Even if a drug is approved for clinical trials, the sponsor continues animal testing of the drug in order to better understand the drug's long-term effects.

Clinical Trials Clinical trials are scientifically controlled studies in which the drug being tested is given to one group of patients, while another treatment, often a placebo (an inactive substance that looks like the drug being tested), is given to another group. Ideally, neither group of patients knows which is receiving the new drug and which is receiving the placebo.

The clinical trials, like the animal tests, examine what happens to the drug in the body, including whether it is changed, or metabolized, in the body, how much of it is absorbed into the blood, and how long it remains in the body. If human tests produce unexpected results, researchers may conduct further animal tests to better understand the drug.

Clinical trials proceed in three phases: Phase 1 involves testing primarily for safety and dosage level. Twenty to one hundred healthy patients are assessed over several months. If the results are within FDA safety guidelines, the trials proceed to phase 2.

Phase 2 involves a greater number of patients—up to several hundred—who have the condition that the drug is intended to treat. During this stage, which lasts from several months to two years, researchers attempt to determine the drug's effectiveness in achieving its stated purpose, as well as its safety. At the end of this phase, sponsors meet with FDA officials to discuss the best way to conduct the next phase of testing.

In phase 3, the most crucial stage of testing, the number of patients is expanded still further, to several hundred to several thousand, and the length of the study is increased to one to four years. This phase establishes the correct dosage of the drug and how it will be labeled, and provides further evidence regarding its safety and effectiveness.

Of one hundred drugs submitted for testing in humans, an average of seventy will pass phase 1. Of these seventy, on average, only thirty-three will remain after phase 2 testing, and twenty-five to thirty after phase 3. Finally, an average of only twenty will actually receive FDA approval.

Once the drug sponsor has completed clinical trials, it submits a new drug application (NDA) to the FDA, requesting approval to market the drug. This application consists of documentation detailing the chemical composition of the drug, the design of the trials, the results of the trials, and the means by which the drug is made and packaged.

FDA Review In assessing an NDA, the FDA undertakes its closest scrutiny of all during the drug approval process. Its principal goal during review is to determine whether the benefits of the new drug outweigh the risks. To reach this determination, the FDA examines the documentation provided by the sponsor and looks at samples of the drug.

If inadequacies are discovered in the NDA, the FDA may require additional information, further testing, or modified labeling. In cases where it is difficult to establish clearly whether the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks, a panel of outside experts is often consulted.

If the FDA approves the drug, the sponsor may begin manufacturing and marketing the drug immediately.

The FDA does not stop monitoring a drug once it has been marketed. It continues to evaluate the drug's safety and effectiveness through its program of postmarket surveillance. This program consists of surveys, the testing of product samples, and the analysis of reported adverse reactions.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is requiring manufacturers to include a general warning in the drug labeling of all approved testosterone products about the risk of blood clots in the veins. Blood clots in the veins, also known as venous thromboembolism (VTE), include deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE). The risk of venous blood clots is already included in the labeling of testosterone products as a possible consequence of polycythemia, an abnormal increase in the number of red blood cells that sometimes occurs with testosterone treatment. Because there have been postmarket reports of venous blood clots unrelated to polycythemia, FDA is requiring a change to drug labeling of all testosterone products to provide a more general warning regarding venous blood clots and to ensure this risk is described consistently in the labeling of all approved testosterone products.

Because these clots occur in the veins, this new warning is not related to FDA’s ongoing evaluation of the possible risk of stroke, heart attack, and death in patients taking testosterone products. We are currently evaluating the potential risk of these cardiovascular events, which are related to blood clots in the arteries and are described in the Drug Safety Communication posted on January 31, 2014.

Testosterone products are FDA-approved for use in men who lack or have low testosterone levels in conjunction with an associated medical condition. Examples of these conditions include failure of the testicles to produce testosterone for reasons such as genetic problems or chemotherapy.

Testosterone products can increase the risk of venous blood clots. Manufacturers of such products are now required to include related information and warnings on labels.

Previously blood clots were listed on labels as warnings under polycythemia, an increase in red blood cells. Studies have shown that this venous abnormality can sometimes be the result of testosterone products.

However, in response to reports of blood clots unrelated to polycythemia, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is requiring manufacturers to list risk of blood clots as a direct warning on testosterone products, rather than only as an effect of polycythemia. The FDA received such reports after the approval and sale of these products.

The products in question are useful for men with low testosterone levels, sometimes a result of chemotherapy and sometimes genetics. Decreased levels can lead to symptoms such as decreased libido, depression and fatigue.

A blood clot can become a thrombus, which is a clot that stays in place, or an embolism, which is a clot that travels to other parts of the body and blocks blood flow in those locations.

The FDA is also conducting an investigation of the risk of stroke, heart attack, and death following usage of testosterone products. The investigation, which began in January, was influenced by two separate studies showing significantly higher risks of cardiovascular problems in men using testosterone products. The men in the studies were in both the older, post-60 age group as well as the younger, pre-30 group. Officials say this investigation is unrelated to the venous blood clots and the new requirements for manufacturers.

The FDA said in its statement explaining its investigation that doctors "should consider whether the benefits of FDA-approved testosterone treatment is likely to exceed the potential risks of treatment."

It also stressed that patients should not stop taking the prescribed products without consulting their healthcare professionals. All products, which are sold as topical gels, transdermal patches, and injections, are FDA-approved only as a therapy for low testosterone levels seen in conjunction with a medical condition.

According to Bloomberg, testosterone drugs have a $1.6 billion market value.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is investigating the risk of stroke, heart attack, and death in men taking FDA-approved testosterone products. We have been monitoring this risk and decided to reassess this safety issue based on the recent publication of two separate studies that each suggested an increased risk of cardiovascular events among groups of men prescribed testosterone therapy. We are providing this alert while we continue to evaluate the information from these studies and other available data, and will communicate our final conclusions and recommendations when the evaluation is complete.

At this time, FDA has not concluded that FDA-approved testosterone treatment increases the risk of stroke, heart attack, or death. Patients should not stop taking prescribed testosterone products without first discussing any questions or concerns with their health care professionals. Health care professionals should consider whether the benefits of FDA-approved testosterone treatment is likely to exceed the potential risks of treatment. The prescribing information in the drug labels of FDA-approved testosterone products should be followed.

Testosterone is a hormone essential to the development of male growth and masculine characteristics. Testosterone products are FDA-approved only for use in men who lack or have low testosterone levels in conjunction with an associated medical condition. Examples of these conditions include failure of the testicles to produce testosterone because of reasons such as genetic problems or chemotherapy. Other examples include problems with brain structures, called the hypothalamus and pituitary, that control the production of testosterone by the testicles.

None of the FDA-approved testosterone products are approved for use in men with low testosterone levels who lack an associated medical condition. FDA-approved testosterone formulations include the topical gel, transdermal patch, buccal system (applied to upper gum or inner cheek), and injection.

The first publication that prompted FDA to reassess the cardiovascular safety of testosterone therapy was an observational study of older men in the U.S. Veteran Affairs health system published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in November 2013.1 The men included in this study had low serum testosterone and were undergoing imaging of the blood vessels of the heart, called coronary angiography, to assess for coronary artery disease. Some of the men received testosterone treatment while others did not. On average, the men who entered the study were about 60 years old, and many had underlying cardiovascular disease. This study suggested a 30 percent increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and death in the group that had been prescribed testosterone therapy.

A second observational study reported an increased risk of heart attack in older men, as well as in younger men with pre-existing heart disease, who filled a prescription for testosterone therapy.2 The study reported a two-fold increase in the risk of heart attack among men aged 65 years and older in the first 90 days following the first prescription. Among younger men less than 65 years old with a pre-existing history of heart disease, the study reported a two- to three-fold increased risk of heart attack in the first 90 days following a first prescription. Younger men without a history of heart disease who filled a prescription for testosterone, however, did not have an increased risk of heart attack.