U.S. Food and Drug Administration

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the American regulator overseeing the safety of food additives and the approval of drugs for clinical trials — elsewhere's corpus doesn't profile the agency itself, but it surfaces repeatedly as the gatekeeper Chinese biotech and food-tech companies report milestones against. In Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio updates, for instance, probiotic maker WeCare's strain BLa80 became the first from mainland China to pass both FDA self-affirmed GRAS and the FDA GRAS Notice — GRAS being the FDA's authoritative safety certification for food additives, per Qiming — while Jianda Jiuzhou's GA001 injection, a gene-therapy candidate for retinitis pigmentosa, received FDA clearance to begin Phase II trials . For the FDA's organizational history or structure, elsewhere's corpus does not cover that.