Medical Device Product Development

As your life science organization advances and begins to expand its teams and portfolios, opportunities for productive, long-term growth present themselves. However, these opportunities aren’t always realized to their fullest extent or are missed out on entirely. If you’re struggling to grow your life science company, what could be slowing you down? To answer this question, there are four key areas you should take care of: process maturity, people, planning, and product portfolio management.

The medical device industry is in a state of immense change. Powered by technology, there are now incredible opportunities to improve patient outcomes, offer new and dynamic treatments, and help your organization thrive as a result. However, this technological change brings with it a number of new and evolving risk factors specific to our modern landscape.

Life science product development can sometimes be a niche enterprise, and for good reason—certain populations and conditions require specific solutions and treatments. Providing these can be a boon to both patient outcomes and your organization’s bottom line, as well as progressing that particular field of treatment.

We have entered the age of big data—the volume of data gathered in healthcare alone is becoming larger and more complex as the days go by. This wealth of information has sparked the rise of open access databases for public and commercial use around the globe. All this freely available data can be a boon to innovation in life sciences. However, the risks these databases present, and the approaches regulatory agencies take toward those risks, are important considerations for your organization.

Labeling is an important part of FDA’s quality system regulation for medical devices. So important, in fact, that labeling regulations are captured in several distinct parts of 21 CFR Subchapter H – Medical Devices. These sections cover how devices are tracked, the unique device identifiers (UDIs) and universal product codes (UPCs) necessary for that tracking, and specific labeling requirements.

First codified in the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997, least burdensome provisions have guided all of FDA’s regulatory work ever since. The provisions impact everything from the development of new guidance documents to adjusting and improving upon existing approval pathways, and so on. Particularly with the agency’s bolstered commitment to addressing digital health products in the coming years, the least burdensome approach has never been so important. But how does FDA actually define “least burdensome” exactly, and how do they enact it?

Time to market is only part of the equation when it comes to being competitive in life science industries. The other major factor is differentiation: what does your product do that is inventive and improves outcomes for users and patients beyond the capacities of similar, legally marketed products? To build that value into your product, innovation is key.

While this was a slower month than usual due to the government shutdown, FDA has still been active. Here are a few important updates from January 2019 your life science organization may want to keep up with.

A core component of managing your medical device design is identifying and maintaining its essential outputs. However, there’s a lot of gray area when it comes to essential outputs, and the regulatory definitions aren’t always clear. In order to adequately address them in your development activities, figuring out what these outputs are is key.