Priority review drugs approved by the <scp>FDA</scp> and the <scp>EMA</scp>: time for international regulatory harmonization of pharmaceuticals?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) priority review process applies to a drug that is considered a significant improvement over the available alternatives. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) accelerated approval applies to a product that is of major public health interest. This study assessed differences in the characteristics of priority review new molecular entities and new therapeutic biologic products approved by the FDA and the EMA. METHODS: This study includes regulatory information on drug applications, approvals, indications, and orphan designations of all priority review drugs approved by the FDA and the EMA in the period 1999-2011. Descriptive statistics, t-tests, and chi-squared and Wilcoxon tests were performed. RESULTS: Overall, 100 FDA priority review new molecular entities and new therapeutic biologics were approved by both agencies; 87.0% of the products were first approved by the FDA. The average FDA review time (9.2 ± 8.4 months) was significantly lower than the EMA average review time (14.6 ± 4.0 months) (p < 0.0001). The FDA and the EMA granted orphan designation to 43.0% and 33.0%, respectively, of the applications. There were differences in the administration route (1.0% of all products), dosage (8.0%), strength (23%), posology (51.0%), indications (30.0%), restrictions of use (52.0%), limitations of use (19.0%), and outcomes limitations (28.0%) approved by both regulatory agencies. CONCLUSION: Significant differences exist in the characteristics of the priority review drugs approved by the FDA and the EMA. Harmonization of the US and European regulatory frameworks may facilitate timely approval of pharmaceutical products.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.070 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".