FDA User Fee Deadlines: Jenkins Expands On Interview Comments

In a roundtable interview with top FDA drug officials, Office of New Drugs director John Jenkins said FDA was on track to meet 80%-90% of its prescription drug user fee act (PDUFA) goals. To read Part I and Part II of the roundtable interviews, click here and here.

Jenkins wrote in to clarify and expand on his comments related to user fee deadlines:

“In our recent interview with Ramsey Baghdadi and The RPM Report I made some comments about the status of our current performance in meeting PDUFA goal dates. Those comments have been widely reported and I feel that I need to alert readers to a clarification since I may have misspoke during the interview since I did not have the data in front of me and was working from memory.

What I should have said is the following:

For the FY07 cohort of applications (as of June 30, 2008, which is the most recent update I have and the one I was referring to when we did the interview) our actual performance on application goals is generally in the 80-90% range. For the same cohort for procedural and processing goals our performance is also generally between 80-90%. The FY07 cohort is mature enough to draw firm conclusions regarding performance.

For the FY08 cohort of applications, the numbers are very preliminary since many of the applications in this cohort have not yet achieved their first PDUFA goal date. Our potential performance for application goals and procedural and processing goals ranges from 80-90%. The actual performance to date (as of June 30, 2008) is below these levels in many areas, but the data are so immature that it is too early to make comments on actual performance. In the interview I was referring to potential performance, but I did not make that clear. It is possible that our actual performance for FY08 will be below the 80-90% potential performance level in some areas, but it’s too early to say.”