The Academic NDA: Justification, Process, and Lessons Learned

The University of Iowa recently completed a 4-y expedition into the uncharted waters of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new-drug application (NDA) process that ultimately resulted in approval of Ga-68-DOTATOC in August 2019. The journey was enlightening, revealing a highly structured, arcane, but rigorous regulatory approval process. The FDA proved to be an efficient, reasonable, and communicative regulatory body that achieved balance between support of the initiative and its mission-bound, process-bound duty to ensure that the application met the expected safety and efficacy standards of the agency. With several clinically valuable PET radiopharmaceuticals without intellectual property residing in regulatory limbo, without industry champions to bring them to marketing approval, there may be justification for a more concerted effort from the molecular imaging community into generating better understanding, support, and perhaps even infrastructure for the academic NDA. As a first step, this article briefly describes the start-to-finish story for Ga-68-DOTATOC, including a description of the clinical trials, a broad overview of the structured content of the NDA document, and the distilled experiences associated with the Ga-68-DOTATOC NDA process. It is anticipated that with sustained free sharing of information relating to the FDA drug registration process, it will prove less daunting and more efficient in future academically sponsored NDA filings for PET imaging agents.