Regulatory Affairs 101: Introduction to Expedited Regulatory Pathways.

Developing a novel drug, including discovery, nonclinical toxicology studies, initial clinical trials, and thorough pivotal studies, may take many years. Once an applicant has generated this comprehensive body of data, the final step prior to regulatory approval is Health Authority review of the marketing authorization application. Review by regulatory authorities to evaluate whether the data support a positive benefit/risk profile takes many months, adding additional time before patients may access therapy. In this paper, we discuss the various opportunities the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency offer to expedite the drug development and regulatory approval timelines for drugs intended to treat serious diseases and unmet medical needs.

Regulatory Affairs 101: Introduction to Investigational New Drug Applications and Clinical Trial Applications.

Testing novel drugs on fellow human beings is fraught with potential ethical concerns; however, developing drugs to treat the wide spectrum of human diseases and disorders is a moral imperative. How do we best navigate the balance between protecting the individual vs. the greater good? Global government regulatory bodies are accountable for ensuring that medical experiments on human subjects are appropriately justified and subject to close oversight. In this article, we focus on two major global health authorities, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and the path to legally treating humans with new investigational products.

Odorant receptor gene regulation: implications from genomic organization.

Odorant receptor genes comprise the largest known family of G-protein-coupled receptors in vertebrates. These receptor genes are tightly clustered in the genomes of every vertebrate organism investigated, including zebrafish, mice and humans, and they appear to have expanded and duplicated throughout evolution. In a mechanism that has yet to be elucidated, each olfactory neuron expresses a single receptor gene. This highly restricted expression pattern underlies the ability to distinguish between a wide variety of odorants. Here, we address the evolutionary expansion of odorant receptor genes and the role genomic organization of these genes might have in their tightly regulated expression.