WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration has a lot on its plate in 2024 with the reorganizations of its food center and the office that inspects FDA-regulated facilities.
Amid that massive reorganization, the FDA also will lose one of its most influential leaders. Janet Woodcock is retiring at the beginning of the year after decades of service. She helped guide some of the most impactful changes to the regulation of medicine and was a steady hand on the agency’s tiller throughout several administrations.
The agency also will likely need to decide whether to take action on the regulation of lab-developed diagnostics, and it’s getting serious about making clinical trials more representative of the people that drugs treat.