The obvious result of the legal shootout between the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and clinical laboratory trade associations, the American Clinical Laboratory Association and the Association for Molecular Pathology, in the Eastern District of Texas to determine whether the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) permits the agency to regulate laboratory developed tests (LDTs) is a complete victory for clinical laboratories. The U.S. district judge’s decision, issued on March 31, 2025, vacated the May 2024 final rule through which FDA sought to specify that LDTs are agency-regulated in vitro diagnostic products (IVDs) and to describe a plan for phasing-in enforcement of existing medical device regulations for such products over four years (see our previous posts on the LDT final rule here and here). In adopting the plaintiffs’ arguments wholesale, however, the judge created some incongruities in the relevant regulatory frameworks, as well as several quandaries for FDA and the clinical laboratory industry going forward. These inconsistencies could have greater consequences down the road if the Trump administration decides not to appeal the ruling.

We have written at length about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) actions to promulgate regulations specifying the agency’s authority to regulate laboratory developed tests (LDTs) as medical devices and to phase out the agency’s historical approach of enforcement discretion towards such tests (see here, here, here, and here). However, one infrequently considered regulatory compliance issue for LDTs is their reliance on separate specimen collection devices or convenience kits. All LDTs require the use of some form of biological specimen, such as blood or saliva, which may be collected by health care professionals in a clinical setting or by consumers in their homes before being submitted to a laboratory for testing. 

Every year, Mintz provides analysis of the regulatory developments affecting public companies as they approach fiscal year-end filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and annual shareholder meetings. This memorandum highlights key considerations to guide you through the 2025 year-end reporting process.

In this webinar we discuss the regional challenges in regulating medical product AI with a focus on different regulatory approaches in the US, EU, and UK.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) recently held its 2024 Exploratory Workshop titled “The Evolving Landscape of Human Research with AI – Putting Ethics to Practice” (the Workshop). Although the individual presentations and panel discussions throughout the Workshop covered a range of topics and raised a number of interesting questions and hypotheticals, the panelists did not draw any specific conclusions or reach any kind of consensus about next steps to address the critical issues. Even so, the panelists provided some crucial insights that companies and regulators must grapple with in the context of expanding use cases for AI in human research and creating rules governing such uses.

Agencies across the federal government continue to grapple with how to respond to the directives in President Biden’s October 2023 executive order on artificial intelligence, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its parent agency the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). As summarized in this handy Mintz/ML Strategies timeline of the actions set forth in President Biden’s AI executive order, DHHS has a mandate to “develop a strategy for regulating the use of AI in the drug development process” and a deadline of October 29, 2024 to meet that obligation. Notably, earlier this year DHHS announced a functional reorganization within the department that included creating the position of Chief AI Officer in response to the presidential order.

Obtaining Medicare coverage and reimbursement for medical devices is notoriously more difficult than for drugs or biologics, and any progress on expanding coverage pathways has been agonizingly slow for industry stakeholders. An announcement on August 7, 2024 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) of a final notice for the Transitional Coverage for Emerging Technologies (TCET) pathway was therefore a welcome development. However, digging under the surface of the TCET pathway uncovers some less than thrilling details. CMS’s failure to address stakeholder proposals to modify the TCET program has increased interest and advocacy around Congress’s consideration of the Ensuring Patient Access to Critical Breakthrough Products Act. We explore both the shortcomings of the TCET pathway and the possible legislative solutions to its perceived gaps below.

Read about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI) joint workshop in the latest edition of AI: The Washington Report, a joint undertaking of Mintz and ML Strategies covering potential federal legislative, executive, and regulatory activities related to AI.

Now that the final rule on laboratory developed tests (LDTs) has been available for over a month and the stages of the enforcement discretion phaseout process and the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) newly proposed policies for continuing limited enforcement discretion for certain types of LDTs have been thoroughly described and dissected (including by us in our previous post), it’s high time to dig into FDA’s perspectives on the comments it received on the proposed rule. 

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published its final rule on laboratory developed tests (LDTs) in the Federal Register on May 6, marking a watershed moment in the agency’s arduous decade-plus-long journey toward winding down its historical enforcement discretion posture for LDTs. But FDA’s crusade is far from over. It will have much to do to implement the four-year phase-out period described in the final rule and those efforts may be delayed by litigation seeking to enjoin implementation of the rule altogether. While we wait for the litigation shoe to drop, let’s take a look at what the final rule says and the changes FDA made in these highly significant policy decisions since the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was published on October 3, 2023 (see our previous posts on the NPRM here and here).