Over the last three decades many first-generation nanomedicines have successfully entered routine clinical use and it is now important for medicines regulatory agencies to consider the mechanisms needed to ensure safe introduction of 'follow-on' nanomedicine products, 'nanosimilars'. Moreover, drug regulators need to ensure that 'next'-generation nanomedicines enter clinical development and consequently the market in a safe and timely way for the benefit of public health. Here we review recent European Medicines Agency activities that relate to the effective development and evaluation of nanomedicine products while keeping patient and consumer safety at the forefront.
Pharmacogenomics (PGx) has a growing impact on healthcare and constitutes one of the major pillars of personalised medicine. For the purpose of improved individualised drug treatment, there is an increasing effort to develop drugs suitable for specific subpopulations and to incorporate pharmacogenomic drug labels in existing and novel medicines. Here, we review the pharmacogenomic drug labels of all 517 medicinal products centrally approved in the European Union (EU) since the establishment of the European Medicines Agency in 1995. We identified all pharmacogenomic-related information mentioned in the product labels and classified it according to its main effect and function on drug treatment, that is, metabolism, transport and pharmacodynamics, and according to the place of the respective section of the Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC). The labels are preferentially present in drugs having antineoplastic properties. We find that the number of drugs with pharmacogenomic labels in EU increases now steadily and that it will be an important task for the future to refine the legislation on how this information should be utilised for improvement of drug therapy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.