The Food and Drug Administration has just announced a restructuring. The agency will be adding a new department, the Office of Pharmaceutical Quality, to rectify some serious manufacturing problems that have come to light over the past decade.
Last year, drug recalls affected 70 million drug units. As alarming as that sounds, it is actually an improvement over previous years when 225 million units were recalled annually.
The new Office of Pharmaceutical Quality will pay special attention to extended-release drugs. This is in large part because the agency discovered that some generic forms of Wellbutrin XL 300 were not bioequivalent. This discovery and certain others forced the FDA to reconsider its approach to extended-release generic medications.
