FDA requests recall of eye drops from many famous pharmaceutical companies

The FDA has released a list of 26 over-the-counter eye drops, stating that using these products could lead to partial vision loss or even blindness. The eye drops in question are from CVS Health, Rite Aid Cardinal Health, Target (Up & Up line), and Velocity Pharma. The FDA has asked these manufacturers to recall all related products from the market and stop promoting these products.

US health officials advise consumers to properly dispose of these eye drops and recommend that patients who develop signs or symptoms of eye infection after using these products seek prompt ophthalmological examination.

Meanwhile, according to health experts, a growing trend in the global pharmaceutical industry is that major drugmakers are increasingly using artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly find patients for clinical trials or to reduce the number of people needed to test drugs. The goal is to both speed up the drug development process and save companies millions of dollars.

Human studies are the most expensive and time-consuming part of drug development. Companies can spend years recruiting patients and testing new drugs, a process that can cost them more than $1 billion from discovery to completion.

The FDA said it received about 300 applications to incorporate AI or machine learning technology in drug development from 2016 to 2022. More than 90% of those applications were submitted in the past two years, and most were for the use of AI at some point during clinical development.

Pharmaceutical giants like Amgen, Bayer and Novartis are training AI to scan billions of public health records, prescriptions, insurance claims and their own internal data to find trial patients. In some cases, this has cut the time companies spend on the process in half.