Faster Together

The US Food and Drug Administration is teaming up with medical device companies and non-profit groups to speed up the development time for medical devices, reports Nature Medicine's Spoonful of Medicine blog. To do so, the groups created the Medical Device Innovation Consortium, which FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg said, during a press conference, would "create a safe haven for pre-competitive collaborative research between academia and industry focusing on medical devices."

MedPage Today notes that FDA has often been accused of having a "convoluted, slow, and unpredictable" device-approval process, and, consequently, devices are often first approved in Europe.

By the Medical Device Innovation Consortium members sharing resources and ideas, "for the first time, we can determine priorities, bring together collaborative minds and analyze post-market values to determine safety and efficacy," said Jeffrey Shuren, the director of FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health, at the press conference, according to the Spoonful of Medicine.