Opinion: FDA is smashing the status quo for regulatory science

A recent press release from the Food and Drug Administration titled “Reorganization of the Office of New Drugs with Corresponding Changes to the Office of Translational Sciences and the Office of Pharmaceutical Quality,” may have sounded like another bland and boring exercise in regulatory rhetoric. But it actually signals a revolutionary shift in regulatory velocity.

Changes in the FDA’s Office of New Drugs (OND) will create enhanced review zones that cross disease areas and divisions to maximize access to more focused and innovative areas of regulatory expertise. These changes will, among other things, increase the number of OND offices overseeing product reviews from six to eight and increase the number of specific clinical review divisions from 19 to 27. The rationale is to make the FDA more efficient and help it better understand the diseases that are the aim of treatment by the drugs being