- For Immediate Release:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today welcomed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, a visit that included remarks to FDA employees, meetings with agency leadership, and a tour of several medical device innovation laboratories on the FDA’s White Oak campus.
The visit, which comes just days after Martin A. Makary, M.D. was sworn in as Commissioner of Food and Drugs, indicates the high priority that the Secretary has placed on the public health work of the FDA.
During his remarks to FDA staff, Secretary Kennedy charged employees with the responsibility of responding to and ending the chronic health care crisis plaguing our nation’s children. "I really want to empower you," Secretary Kennedy said. He noted that public health needs “an inspired and engaged workforce. And you're the leaders in that workforce."
In introducing Secretary Kennedy, Commissioner Makary thanked the Secretary for the confidence “you and the President have placed on me to lead this essential public health agency.” He pledged to build on the agency’s “long and distinguished history” to forge a new and even more effective path for public health by “applying the gold standard of scientific research” to help us find new cures for diseases and ending the “epidemic of chronic illness we face in our nation today.”
The tour included visits to several laboratories that are part of the FDA's Center for Devices and Radiological Health. The first stop of the tour was at the Home as a Health Care Hub, an FDA initiative to help foster person-centered, innovative medical devices for use in the home, a critical component of the future delivery of health care. He also participated in a virtual reality demonstration of the tool that simulates the patient experience managing diabetes with devices in the home. Among others are a laboratory that focuses on 3-D printing and Additive Manufacturing, a technology that enables manufacturers and designers to create devices matched to a patient’s anatomy, or for very complex internal structures, and to make changes easily without the need to set up additional equipment or tools. The Secretary also visited a cardiovascular lab, in which he saw cardiovascular device performance simulation and other advanced testing methodologies and computational models developed by FDA scientists being used by medical device innovators in the development and assessment of their technology across different clinical conditions, resulting in reduced risk and accelerated innovation.
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Boilerplate
The FDA, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, protects the public health by assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human and veterinary drugs, vaccines and other biological products for human use, and medical devices. The agency also is responsible for the safety and security of our nation’s food supply, cosmetics, dietary supplements, radiation-emitting electronic products, and for regulating tobacco products.
