FDA Scrutiny of Promotion and Advertising Practices

If you go "off label" with advertising and promotion, FDA's hammer can hit hard and seemingly out of the blue. Advertising and promotion for devices is weak and lacks legal clarity. For drugs, the regulations are prescriptive and guidance documents clamp down on nuances. Marketing and regulatory affairs departments must collaborate to avoid the hammer and penalties of FDA. The roadblock, however is that marketing managers and regulatory affairs managers rarely reach common ground and are loathe to even consult with each other.

FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) has never issued a comprehensive guidance on advertising and promotion. You are on your own. In contrast, FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) uses long-standing regulations and a growing number of guidance documents in its regulatory approach. Policing social media has become a new regulatory responsibility and FDA is still trying to figure out how to deal with it. Bottom line, do you know when you fail to meet FDA's requirements or are you guessing? Can you afford to guess? The cost to your business and the confusion left in your customers' mind becomes an unwelcomed nightmare.

In this seminar, you will learn how to navigate FDA's numerous legal options and how to interpret them based on basic legal principles. Applying new guidance documents becomes a new test of the FDA's legal boundaries and enforcement options. The agency is now conducting clinical studies and applies the principles of cognitive psychology to aid in its determination of what a message really conveys. This academic discipline may or may not get to the root of what consumers take away as the message.

Congress and the new FDA Commissioner seem more sympathetic to expanding access to medical treatment before all the conclusive evidence for safety and effectiveness is evaluated by the FDA. Valid off-label information may take the lead in that direction.