It's finally here!

Today was the FDA's much anticipated public hearing the use of social media in the pharma/biotech industry. The hearing is expected run all day tomorrow as well with well over 900 people attempting to register for the 350 spots available. As reported on EyeonFDA, the agency seems to be perfectly content to "soak" in all the suggestions and input from the various pharma/biotech attendees and leave all formal comments until after the hearing has concluded. This really isn't surprising to me, why would the FDA use this opportunity to act swiftly and provide much needed guidance for the use of social media as a marketing and publicity tool for drug/device manufacturers? It is an immensely important topic and the hearing should have happened 6 months to a year ago so that formal documentation could have been issued before warning letters were issued to companies using various internet avenues for advertising. What will come of this hearing remains to be seen, but the one thing that is for certain is that the FDA should take advantage of the two day session to set some very important guidelines for marketing in the exploding realm of social media.

Read here for what Fierce Pharma has to say about day 1 of the hearing


And...finally GSK received its approval for novel H1N1 flu vaccine, a couple months behind its competitors. While that's good for GSK, the company is acknowledging that it likely won't be able to contribute a whole lot to the overall fight against the burgeoning pandemic in the Northern Hemisphere (unless of course an approval for an adjuvanted version follows suit...).

Here's the report from Fierce Vaccines